


I'm going to get there the only way I know

by marginaliana, solarift



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Multiple Pov, Supernatural Elements, rating is for the violence, unorthodox use of body parts but not in a sex way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-23 09:31:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 36,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11399826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana, https://archiveofourown.org/users/solarift/pseuds/solarift
Summary: Outside the church in Kentucky, Harry realizes that the centers of aggression aren't the only things that have awoken in his mind. The thing that's fizzing in his veins isn't anger. It's power. Electric, vibrant. Magical. In another universe he might have died here. But in this universe, Harry ends up with a few more tricks up his sleeve. Valentine (literally) isn't going to know what hit him.





	1. Chapter 1

"Do you know what this is like?" Valentine asks. "It's like those old movies we both love. Now I'm going to tell you my whole plan, and then I'm going to come up with some absurd and convoluted way to kill you and you'll find an equally convoluted way to escape."

"Sounds good to me."

"Well, this ain't that kind of movie."

Valentine lifts the gun and fires. 

Maybe, if nothing else had happened, Harry would have died here. The bullet would have struck him just above the right eye; he'd have staggered back, collapsed bleeding onto the asphalt. Maybe he'd have gasped out some last words – regrets, pleas. Maybe all he'd have said was a name. Then he'd have died, leaving nothing of himself but a powerful motivation of revenge for the ones who loved him.

But this isn't that kind of movie, either.

 

\-----

In the church, the anger in his stomach starts like a candle flame. It flickers into life as he listens to the sermon being spouted from the pulpit, grows in strength and heat as he takes in the people around him, small-minded, cruel, looking for someone to blame.

Harry is looking for someone to blame, too. He is angry – at everyone he sees, vile and stupid and credulous; angry at Eggsy for his failure of nerve and of understanding; angry at Arthur for dwelling on Eggsy's failure like the smug arsehole that he'd always been.

Angry at himself, for far too many things to name.

He had taught himself long ago to use his anger as nourishment, to let it fuel him for all the parts of the job that were boring or tiring or unpleasant. There was no shortage of these and there was no shortage of anger, either, and so the two worked well in combination. Anger was a tool, like everything was a tool – it was something to be wielded, for good or for ill depending on his own choices.

Yet when he stands to leave the church, he is not in control. The anger has become a heat inside him, bubbling behind his eyes and beneath his skin. It feels like a wildfire, crackling through his fingers in a great conflagration. He hates them all – the people here, the people everywhere, the Kingsmen in their self-righteousness, all the pathetic grasping fools of the world. What, in the end, is the point of saving people like this? Let Valentine come, whatever his purpose. Let destruction come, let violence come, let death come.

The woman beside him asks him a question, and he answers her with clipped words, all the ones he knows she will not want to hear. "Hail Satan and have a lovely afternoon, madam," and they feel sweet in his mouth, a thick, dark syrup dripping poison from his tongue.

The church erupts.

It is sweet, too, the way Harry relishes the fight. He is nothing but rage now, violence, the sick pleasure that always comes when using himself as a weapon but intensified beyond anything he has felt before. He is good at this and he won't hold back. He hates them all. He will kill them all.

Only when they are dead does he leave the church, leave the bodies behind. His head clears a little but the heated tide of rage is still in him, slithering down his spine and into his hands, his fingertips. Valentine is there – snide, delighting in his own imagined clever malice, but his cruelties are nothing to Harry, nothing to what is rising in the pit of his stomach. 

"Clever, isn't it?" Valentine says. "In simple terms, it's a neurological wave that triggers the centers of aggression and switches off inhibitors." 

Harry knows, abstractly, that he is in danger… but he cannot be afraid. He can only hate them, Valentine and his smugness, Gazelle and her sardonic amusement, the array of black-clad guards standing stupidly behind. He hates them all.

He spares Valentine a few words. Valentine smirks, tosses off a quick reply and then lifts the gun and fires. 

And in that moment Harry realizes: the centers of aggression aren't the only things that have awoken in his mind. The thing that is fizzing in his veins isn't only anger. It's something more.

**It's power.**

_Stop,_ Harry thinks. 

He doesn't move, but the bullet slows in the air, sharply, impossibly, until it comes to rest hovering only six inches from Harry's forehead. It's no real effort to hold it there. The power emanates from him like an aura – he's almost surprised to discover that he can't see it. Sunlight ripples across the bullet's surface as it turns, counterclockwise, back towards his enemies. Back towards Valentine. 

Valentine is gaping, his eyes fixed on the bullet. Already Harry can see the beginnings of excitement in his expression, the kind that generally presages hours of experimentation when he sees it on Merlin's face. He can only imagine himself at Valentine's mercy, being taken apart and hurt over and over again just to see what the results are.

The power simmers across his skin. It's waiting, he knows that somehow. Waiting to be told what to do. 

"Kill him," Harry says softly.

The bullet hits Valentine right between the eyes. He staggers back, arching, and then falls to the asphalt in a spray of blood. Gazelle grabs for him, goes to her knees, but it's too late – Harry's seen enough shots to the head that he can tell that instantly. And he'd told it to kill. It had killed.

Gazelle must know it, too, because the body has barely stopped twitching before she turns. " _You_ ," she says, rising from her crouch. "I'm going to destroy you."

She lunges at him, teeth bared. A sweep of Harry's arm sends power splashing away from him like a wave; when it hits her bladed legs, the metal twists and tangles around itself, gives way with an ear-splitting screech. Gazelle tumbles to the ground, her expression almost fearful, but she catches herself on her forearms and swings around to kick out at Harry with the now-joined blades. Harry dances out of her reach, more by instinct than any conscious intention to do so. 

Behind her, Valentine's guards are hastily unholstering their weapons. Harry knows that he could kill them now, any number of ways. He could light up the bullets in their weapons all at once, set fire to the fabric of their uniforms and watch them burn. He could catch their hearts in his invisible fingers and squeeze the life out of them, one after the other. Maybe even three or four at once.

But the rage is draining away all in a rush, leaving an intense weariness in its wake. He's killed so many today and he barely knows which, if any, were actually due to his own choice. Killing Valentine was necessary – he won't regret that, he can't – but how much of this is truly under his control? It's impossible to tell. He doesn't want to kill again, not if he can't be sure.

_Take me to Kingsman,_ he tells the power. _They'll know what to do._

The power swirls itself around him, creating a sort of hollow tube. It presses in close, squeezing, and then he is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Give the art a <3 or reblog over here: [title page](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651922377/title-page-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with), [page 1](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651892077/pg-1-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with), [page 2-3](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651849537/pg-2-3-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with), [page 4-5](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651808482/pg-4-5-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with).


	2. Chapter 2

Chester doesn't often watch missions – as Arthur, there are better ways of spending his time – but he allows himself the pleasure of watching this one from the familiar comfort of his office. Galahad has been trouble for years, a tiny but persistent rip in the otherwise smooth and seamless fabric of Kingsman's activities. A good agent at first, appropriately respectful and skilled. But over time he'd begun to speak too much, too often, about all the wrong sorts of things. Gentlemanly conduct was important, yes, but it was no substitute for good breeding and never would be. And his priorities were skewed, as if they had time and resources to spend on people who killed prostitutes when there were terrorists out there, real threats. 

The pathetic little chav he'd brought in as his candidate was just one in a series of such mistakes. A mistake that had failed in the end, just as Chester had known he would. Roxanne Morton, for all the disadvantages of her sex, was at least of the right class, the right attitude. Galahad's boy toy was simply too weak.

Valentine is as much an upstart, of course, and American to boot, but he's a useful tool for now. Chester has no intention of letting him remain in control after the purge, and even letting him live is an open question. Perhaps if the man continues to be useful. 

For now Chester has let himself be drawn into the scheme with little protest, has even let Valentine give him one of those ridiculous chips, although his is specially modified to allow him to recruit, discreetly, within Kingsman and other intelligence agencies. He's provided information and select resources, though nothing like the full complement of Kingsman's tools. The church is a test, for Valentine's tech of course but also for his follow-through, his dedication to the quid pro quo that he's promised. If Galahad isn't taken care of here, Chester thinks his relationship with Valentine won't go much further. He can always have someone steal the tech, after all, and then he can do the rest himself.

\-----

"No!"

Eggsy feels rather than hears the shout tear itself from his throat as Valentine raises the gun. For a split second he can see directly down the barrel, the glint of silver as the bullet is fired straight at Harry's face. Eggsy has only a moment to brace himself for the hit, the blood, the devastating clatter of glasses to tarmac. 

Which makes it all the more staggering when it doesn't come. 

The bullet hangs in the air for a long, impossible moment before slowly turning round to face the way it had come. Harry says something softly; Eggsy can't quite make out what it is. Then Valentine goes down and Gazelle launches herself forwards. Harry's hand slashes gracefully through the air and she tumbles to the ground as if swept back by nothing but wind. She looks frightened, but she gets her weight on her hands and pushes up, and then—

The video feed from Harry's glasses flickers and goes black. 

\-----

Chester's monitor provides a handy view of the action in the church. It's a prodigious showing of talent for fighting, for killing – he might even have regretted the forthcoming loss of Galahad's skills if it weren't for the larger plan. And there are other knights, some of them more sympathetic to his aims – they will do well enough for the future he has planned. 

Galahad stumbles outside the church, still shaky on his feet but alive even after the bloodbath. Valentine is pontificating – a regrettable tendency but one Chester has noted in the past as typical of Americans and therefore not particularly surprising. At last he gets to the point, lifts his gun and—

It goes wrong. So wrong that Chester barely has time to process what he's seeing. A bullet, then Valentine down, then Gazelle down, and though she begins to get back up again, Chester doubts whether it will be enough. 

There is an ear-splitting crack. It comes from two places at once, the sound from the feed a split second later than the sound here, in his own ears. The view from the screen goes black, and—

Galahad appears out of nothing on the other side of Chester's desk. 

\-----

Eggsy struggles to comprehend everything he's just witnessed. In each moment he'd thought that would be the worst of it – the sermon first, the hard, sick words which cut deep into a part of him he'd thought scabbed over long ago. Dean had been cruel but mostly in a careless way, tossing off slurs about anyone who was or might have been queer or foreign or weak or some combination thereof. Only rarely did he use that kind of language with real intention. But the preacher in the church was all intention and intensity in the violence of his words. He meant to hurt, and in Eggsy's case he succeeded. 

Then the fighting, Harry wielding his words like a knife and then his hands, his body, his gun, and anything else that came to hand. It wasn't as if Eggsy hadn't seen Harry's skill at fighting before – in the pub with Rottie and Dean's other boys, a few demonstrations during his training – but it was different seeing it like this, unhesitating, aimed not to subdue but to kill as gruesomely as possible. When Harry left the church, there were only corpses remaining.

Then Valentine, the revelations of his plans, the smug certainty of his victory. This, then, must surely be the worst of it, Eggsy had thought. So many dead if he isn't stopped. The poor and the weak and anyone with even a smidgen of conscience, dead. Even those who lived would do it by killing, and what would that do to them?

Then, at last, the gun. Worse even than what had come before, because it was Harry's death he was facing. 

And now Eggsy can see nothing on the screen, not even static. It is black, blank, as if the signal had been cut off at the source.

Maybe Harry's dead.

\-----

For a moment they just stare at each other. Galahad's hair is sweat-soaked and his suit is rumpled, buttons half-undone. There is blood smeared down one side of his face – although it doesn't seem to be his own – and spattered across the front of his suit jacket in one long spray. More to the point, Chester can see as much astonishment on Galahad's face as he knows must be on his own.

"Thank god," Galahad says. "Arthur. I came to report— I—" He sputters for a moment. "Valentine is dead, but Gazelle is still a threat. I don't know what kind of measures they had in place to continue the project in the case of Valentine's death, but I intend to—"

"Why the hell aren't you dead?" Chester says. It isn't remotely what he'd intended to say, but it's certainly what he'd been thinking. "Valentine—" It's absurd, what he's just seen. Some sort of pantomime for his benefit, he thinks, but discards the idea immediately. The video might have been faked but not Galahad's appearance here, right in front of him. _What could possibly explain this?_

Some sort of technology, something not shared with Kingsman. Valentine's, it must be – it isn't the sort of thing that Galahad would have been able to develop, or even Kingsman's best tech wizards. But why would Valentine bring it out now, especially when the experiment in the church had been going so well? Chester supposes that stupidity and arrogance might explain that much, but he wouldn't have credited Galahad with the technical skill needed to turn it against Valentine on barely a moment's notice. Unless he'd infiltrated Valentine's organization already, pretended to join up and learned all he could about the tech and then chosen his moment to turn it back on Valentine instead. No, no, that didn't make sense, either. Galahad wouldn't have kept him out of the loop. Not given the way the boy had always looked up to him.

"He shot me," Galahad says, but there's something wary in his voice now. Chester curses himself for that moment of genuine surprise; he ought to have wondered aloud how Galahad was here instead of in America, ought to have expressed relief in seeing him. He'd been too concerned with the logistics to convincingly maintain his own cover; it's a beginner's mistake. What he's seen is so outlandish— but that's no excuse. Perhaps he's been out of the game for too long.

"But I suppose it didn't take," Galahad continues. His eyes are focused on Chester's face, and Chester does his best to look worried and confused instead of irate. He puts his hands flat on the desk, trying not to look threatening. 

"We'll have Valentine's operation taken care of," he promises. "I'll speak to the US State Department – I can have Gazelle detained, for a while at least. Did Valentine speak of another second in command?"

But Galahad is shaking his head, taking a slow step backwards. "You were watching," he says, and there's horror in his voice. "You set me up."

\-----

Eggsy cannot make himself face the possibility. "If Harry was dead," he says aloud. "If Harry was dead I'd've seen it. All this means is his glasses broke. That's it." Harry is so vital, so much richer than anyone else he knows, and not in the monetary sense. Harry is thrilling; he demands Eggsy's best at every moment, and Eggsy's had to be on his toes constantly over the last couple of months, just to keep from disappointing him.

Except that Eggsy _has_ disappointed him. That stupid test – what could it possibly prove to make him shoot his dog? What sort of lesson was he supposed to learn from that? 'Just be ready to have anyone turn on you at any moment, even the ones you thought you could trust. Be ready to kill, even your friends if you have to.' He's still angry about the senselessness of it all, even an entire day later. But even worse than knowing he'd failed was the look he'd seen on Harry's face. Like Eggsy had let him down – like he'd always known Eggsy would let him down, and he'd just been waiting for the moment. Like he knew Eggsy had never been worth anything at all.

Eggsy jumps to his feet, paces to the door of Harry's study and then back again. He's determined to prove Harry wrong about that, but he'll be shit out of luck if Harry's dead. 

So Harry can't be dead.

What happened with the bullet was impossible, of course. It hadn't just slowed – it had stopped. Then turned around as if held between two invisible fingers. Harry had done that, hadn't he? It certainly seemed as if he'd been in control. But maybe that was assuming too much. Maybe it was a bit of Kingsman tech they hadn't wanted to tell Eggsy about until he was officially in. There was plenty of that, he was sure. It could be some sort of weird magnet shit – maybe Merlin had been there, hidden, ready to activate it if things looked to be going south. Magnets would certainly explain what had happened with Gazelle.

If Eggsy's honest with himself, though, that doesn't seem too likely. If they'd known about what Valentine could do, why not keep Harry from getting into that position in the first place? If someone from Kingsman's in hiding there, why not just pick off Valentine and Gazelle from a distance with a sniper rifle and save everyone a hell of a lot of trouble?

But if it wasn't Kingsman that did that thing with the bullet, if it wasn't Harry… what the fuck was it?

\-----

"For God's sake, Arthur— Chester— I'd never have thought you a turncoat whatever our disagreements."

"Valentine's plan is the only way," Chester says. It's too late to worry about maintaining plausible deniability now and so he abandons it without a second thought. "The human race is killing this planet, you have to acknowledge that much. If we don't do something, we'll doom ourselves." 

"Yes, but… We could make laws, create new technology," Galahad says. "Not just take it upon ourselves to kill – and so many!" 

His faith in the world's legislative bodies is painful in its naivety, Chester thinks. If any of that could have made a blind bit of difference, it would have done so by now. They can't afford to sit around waiting for a miracle to occur. Someone has to take charge. "If not us, who?" he says reasonably. "This is what Kingsman does; we work outside the law, we make choices about who deserves to live or to die. We do what all those bloated governments cannot. This is just—" He waves a casual hand in the air, uses it as a cover for dropping the other hand behind the desk, down to rest on the hilt of the pistol in the drawer. There are two ways this conversation might end – he has to be prepared for either. "—more of the same."

"It's—" Galahad says, and then, "No. No. Not like this. And not— I know who you'd choose to save." He gives Chester a thin-lipped smile. "Your family, your friends' families. All those heads of state, billionaires. People of 'good breeding' and none of the rest." 

"Humanity doesn't need the rest," Chester says, and it's easy to put all his sincerity into his voice. This is nothing but the truth. "We don't need freeloaders and welfare mothers and all those useless people who can't even speak English properly. Humanity needs people like us, like Valentine." It's probably expedient to omit out his plans to eliminate Valentine down the line – after all, Galahad has taken care of that problem for him already. "People who make things happen. Join me, Galahad. There can be a place for you. I can even make one for that boy toy of yours, if you like." 

Galahad doesn't hesitate; Chester hadn't really thought he would. "There is already a place for me," Galahad says quietly. He looks devastated. "And it isn't here." 

"I'm sorry to hear you say it," Chester says. He brings up the gun, but before he can pull the trigger there is another crack, and Galahad is gone.


	3. Chapter 3

Harry hadn't actually needed Chester's gibe about Eggsy to make his mind up. But it certainly provides a suitable reason to end the conversation. "There is already a place for me," he says. "And it isn't here." 

Maybe it's never been here, not really. He'd thought it was, thought of Kingsman as a second home and Chester something like a second father. Of course he'd pushed to change things over the years, for new priorities and new techniques. He'd pushed Chester to recruit with a little more diversity, to find new sources of talent not just for the Kingsmen themselves but for the tech wizards, the handlers, the pilots and mechanics and support staff. Of course he'd pushed. But he'd done it all because he'd believed in what they stood for, that they were doing good for the world. He'd believed in justice and truth and honor, in taking care of their own. He'd believed that working for Kingsman meant holding to all of those things.

But what was that worth, now, when Chester had betrayed him?

He can barely think of it without breaking down. He wants to rage and scream, wants to weep, wants to pull the knife out of the lining of his jacket and lunge across the desk. He wants to kick out under the desk with the blades in his shoes – shoes that Chester had given him, fresh from their development by the wizards. He wants the axe from the church back in his hands.

Anything to keep from remembering all the times that Chester's warm, strong hand had settled on his shoulder. Anything to keep from remembering all the times he'd said, "Well done," in that brusque voice of his and it had made Harry stand just a bit straighter.

But there has been so much blood today, so much rage and hate, so much loss of control. So many dead. He does not think he can bear to increase the total, even by one. 

No, what he needs now is to regroup, to gather his resources – clothes, supplies, ammunition, money. Chester will send people after him, of course, but ten minutes at home ought to be enough to get the basics and then he can have the power take him somewhere else. Somewhere he can rest, tend to his injuries. Somewhere he can figure out what's happened to him, what the power is and what it means. Somewhere he can simply _think_ for a little while instead of just react.

Chester's hand comes up from the drawer, and it's no surprise to Harry to see that he's holding a pistol. There is nothing of familiarity in his face, nothing of affection. Just the hard coldness of stone.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Chester says, but Harry barely hears him. He's already picturing the safe, familiar confines of his study, the regimented lines of the newspapers hung on the wall behind the desk.

 _There,_ he tells the power. _Take me home._

\-----

When he appears in the hallway outside his study, he isn't alone. Eggsy is standing beside the desk staring down at Harry's open laptop, half-turned sideways like he's been pacing across the room and back.

"Harry!" Eggsy says, whipping his head up, bright and surprised and happy. "Harry, thank god you're all right." The difference between his expression and the one Harry has just seen on Chester's face is like night and day, and Harry has to suck in a sharp breath.

He hadn't thought Eggsy would be here. It's been hours since Harry left the house, long enough for him to take a plane across the Atlantic and then some. Plenty of time for Eggsy to disappear, quietly repentant or quietly ashamed – or still angry, full of righteous fury and spoiling for a fight. Plenty of time for him to have got himself into more trouble with his brute of a stepfather, or with a stranger in a pub whose only crime would have been getting in the way.

Plenty of time to decide that Harry's good opinion wasn't worth anything at all.

Harry had half expected to come home and find the place trashed, to be honest. And who could blame the boy, after what Harry had said to him?

Who could blame him for hating Harry now, after he'd stayed, after he'd obviously watched it all unfold via the feed from his glasses? After he'd witnessed Harry kill a whole church full of people in cold blood.

And yet there is nothing of recrimination in Eggsy's face – there is relief rather than hatred, welcome rather than revulsion. Words crowd themselves into the back of Harry's mouth, all the things he'd considered on the flight to Kentucky: the apology that is long overdue for that last, horrible argument. But before he can say any of them Eggsy barrels into him, wraps his arms unashamedly around Harry's waist and hugs him hard.

"Harry—" he says. "Harry, shit, I thought Gazelle might've killed you."

Harry's eyes sting. He puts his arms around Eggsy's shoulders and hangs on tightly. "It's all right," he says. "I'm all right."

They stand together for a long moment. Harry can feel the power still shimmering under his skin, reaching out towards Eggsy in warm tendrils as if it, too, wants to hold him close. How much of that is him and how much is _it_ , he still can't tell. Finally he makes himself pull away, though he can't resist giving the back of Eggsy's neck a squeeze. "This isn't entirely a reprieve," he says. "I don't know whether Gazelle can turn on the machine without Valentine, so it's possible that the danger is still very real. Eggsy— you can't stay here. Valentine had someone inside Kingsman."

"What? Who?" Eggsy demands.

"Arthur," Harry says shortly. He doesn't want to think about this too closely, so he pushes past Eggsy to the desk and opens his hidden drawer, pulling out two spare pistols and a handful of clips. "But there could be others – I don't know who else he might have managed to get to. You can't trust any of them, Eggsy. Not even Merlin. Not even Ms. Morton."

Having gathered what he needs here, Harry heads for the bedroom, Eggsy following on his heels. "You can't think Merlin would've sold you out!" he says. "And not Roxy, neither."

"I don't like to think so," Harry admits, dragging down a duffel bag from the back of the top shelf of the closet and tossing it onto the bed. The guns and ammunition go down beside it. "But I'd not have thought it of Chester, either, up until about three minutes ago."

"Chester? And— Oi! Three minutes ago? How the fuck did you get here so fast? Actually, how the hell ain't you still in Kentucky? Is this more of that Harry Potter shit?"

"Arthur," Harry clarifies, choosing not to discuss the details of his transportation method. Not least because he really doesn't know how it works himself. "His real name is Chester King. Eggsy— just be on your guard, that's all I ask." He pulls a pair of suits from the closet and folds them up carefully. One of them comes away bloody and Harry frowns down at his hands before wiping them across the cleanest part of the jacket he's wearing. Then he shoves the now-bloody suit aside and turns to his dresser. 

"But—" Eggsy says, and the surprise that rings in his voice is strong enough that Harry stops what he's doing to turn and look at him. "I'm coming with you."

"No," Harry says, a flat denial that comes out automatically.

"But I can help!" says Eggsy, and the sincerity of it makes Harry's chest ache. It's clear that he's fucked things up with Eggsy even more than he'd known. Of course Eggsy had failed that last test. He'd only ever wanted to make something of himself. He'd only ever wanted the same things Harry had wanted – to do good in the world, to help people. How was Kingsman supposed to earn the loyalty of someone like that by making him shoot his bloody dog?

But he still can't let Eggsy help him, not now. Not when the boy is barely trained, when it's very likely that he'll get injured or killed – or worse, that he'll have his control taken from him as Harry's was. That he'll be forced to kill someone innocent. For someone like Eggsy, that would be the worst kind of hell.

"No," Harry says. "Eggsy, your mother will need you. Your sister will need you. And I can't—" he cuts off the rest, but it echoes in the back of his mind. _I can't risk you._

This, perhaps, is what he's been mentally avoiding for months, what has made him alternately hold the boy too close and push him away. Why he'd been so angry and disappointed when Eggsy failed the last test – because some small, hidden part of his mind had been envisioning a time when they could be equals, when it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate to suggest moving their relationship from platonic to something more. Because he had thought about late nights in foreign hotels, wild and hard against a wall still high on the adrenaline of a hard mission successfully completed; because he had thought about sun-drenched mornings at home together, waking up with his face pressed against the back of Eggsy's neck. 

If it isn't love, it's only because Harry's had too little time to let it grow that far.

The realization is almost as frightening as Chester's betrayal. Harry wants to sit down, wants to stand in the loo and pet Mr. Pickle and not think about anything for a while, as if he can assimilate all of this new information by letting it percolate into his brain without actually considering it.

But there's no time for that, not now. Chester will be sending someone here, of course, because he'll have to cover all his bases and this is certainly the obvious place for Harry to go. It's _too_ obvious, really, and if not for the head start of Harry's mode of transportation, he wouldn't have come at all. And the power inside him is jittering now, a little unhappy, though Harry can't tell if it's just impatience to be gone or something more than that.

"Your family will need you," he says again, gently now. He busies himself with packing clothes and weapons into the duffel, mainly so that he doesn't have to look Eggsy in the eye.

"Give me five minutes, then," Eggsy says. "I just got to tell mum to take Daisy somewhere safe and then I can come."

"There isn't anywhere safe," Harry says. "Don't you see that? Ninety percent of the population of Britain has one of those SIM cards, and a locked door isn't going to be enough." He zips up the bag, slings it over his shoulder. "If your mother is within earshot of anyone who has one, it will work on her as well. And if she has Daisy with her..." He trails off, but Eggsy's sudden swallow tells him the point has been made. "You'll have to get out of the city," he says. He puts a hand in his pocket, clenches it tight around his keys for a moment before holding them out. "Take my car. It'll get you there faster. Stop by a sporting goods store and buy some ear protection – I don't know if it will do any good, but it's worth a try."

Eggsy doesn't take the keys. "Harry," he says, clearly conflicted. "I can't just leave you all alone."

"You must," says Harry. The odds of them both surviving this are slim to none as it is – but they'll be worse if Eggsy comes with him. At least this way it's more likely that Eggsy will live.

He'd told himself, all through Eggsy's training, that they'd have plenty of time. Now… now, who knows? But if this goodbye is the price Harry has to pay to keep him safe, then so be it.

Harry reaches out and takes Eggsy's hand, drops the keys into his palm and wraps his fingers firmly around them. "You can't stay here – I'd expect this to be the first place they look for me, and it could be as soon as ten or fifteen minutes." He unzips the top of his bag and pulls out one of the pistols, puts it in Eggsy's other hand. "Don't waste time. Don't trust anyone." He takes a deep breath. "And don't you dare get yourself killed."

Then, before he can talk himself out of it, he leans forward and gives Eggsy a quick, fierce kiss. When he steps back, Eggsy's cheeks have gone red.

"Harry—"

He pictures one of his safe houses in his mind, fixing it there with firm determination. 

"Harry!" 

"Goodbye, my dear boy," Harry says. _Take me there,_ he tells the power. _Now._


	4. Chapter 4

The video feed from Harry's glasses had been flickering ever since he'd left the church and performed the impossible; when Valentine's guards raise their guns it goes black entirely, the sound cut off as sharp as a knife edge. Merlin has worked for Kingsman too long to let shock keep him from carrying on as necessary, but he can let his hands work almost automatically through potential ways to strengthen the signal, leaving most of his attention free to turn over everything that he's just seen. 

What had Valentine's signal done to Harry, to all of those people inside the church? How had Harry done those things, with the bullet and with Gazelle? How had he survived what ought to have been certain death? Merlin had flinched back from the screen at the gunshot, more from the anticipation of grief than any sort of squeamishness. When the bullet simply hung in the air he'd felt a surge of absurd hope, but now that the signal is gone, he can feel fear beginning to creep back in. What's happening to Harry now?

They've been friends for so long, first as candidates together and then as handler and agent, or sometimes paired agents on occasions when it made sense to have Merlin out in the field. Merlin has sewn Harry's skin together with Harry's blood dripping over his hands, laughed with him, laughed _at_ him, shouted at him, held his head while he threw up, danced with him, listened to him have sex with all sorts of targets and to all the things he'd said to himself after missions, in the dark in some anonymous hotel room, knowing that Merlin was there just listening in silent witness.

All in all they've worked together for nigh on twenty five years now. In all of that time he's seen Harry eel his way out of so many tight spots that he'd begun to think there was nothing the man couldn't survive. Even Harry's recent altercation with Professor Arnold, as stupid and unexpectedly dangerous as it had been, hadn't kept him down for more than a few weeks. He would cling to that faith if it weren't for the memory of all the death in the church, the memory of the bullet floating in the air. 

Because this could be worse than Harry inches from death. This could be Harry having lost himself.

None of the satellites over Kentucky can give him anything, and none of Harry's trackers are working. After another few attempts, Merlin gives up on the technology entirely. The signal isn't weak or filled with interference – it's fried entirely, as if the camera and microphone have simply ceased to exist. It's a similar effect to the result of an EMP, but Merlin doesn't know why Valentine would have brought one, or how he or Gazelle would have triggered it, not in the middle of all of that. And even if it had been an EMP, that certainly didn't explain what had happened with the bullet.

He needs someone on the ground in Kentucky. Someone who can look with their own eyes, touch with their own hands. Assuming that whatever it is can been seen and touched, that is. Merlin begins the request to open a channel with Statesman headquarters, then pauses abruptly halfway through when he remembers the last time someone talked to the Americans without Arthur's approval. It hadn't been pretty.

_Sod it,_ he thinks, but he pushes back from his desk and strides down the hall, steps as hurried as he can make them without actually running.

At the door to Arthur's office he lifts his hand to knock – because if there's one thing that Arthur is anal about, it's that, even in times of emergency, and manners will get him further than any other method of persuasion. But before his knuckles can make contact with wood there is a loud noise from within, a _crack_ not unlike a gunshot, although it's drawn out a bit longer and the sound is a bit more jagged. 

"Arthur?" Merlin says. For a moment there is no answer and so now he does knock, calls again. "Arthur?"

"Come!" Chester sounds peevish, and Merlin opens the door with some trepidation. But he needs information, he needs _backup_ for Harry, who is probably too busy or proud or stupid (or too overwhelmed by whatever it is) to get it for himself, just at the moment. That's far more important than staying on Arthur's good side.

Chester's face is flushed and he has that little groove in the middle of his forehead that never bodes well for anyone. Merlin judges the irritation level in an instant and decided he's better off just diving in. He stands straight and folds his hands behind his back, almost coming to attention.

"Something's gone wrong with Galahad in Kentucky," he says. "The signal's gone and I can't raise him. Permission to request American backup?"

They ought to have had it beforehand, really, but Arthur had vetoed the idea with a swift, "No. I'm sure Galahad can handle things satisfactorily," and Harry had by then been angry and mortified about Eggsy and hadn't argued.

_Christ._ Merlin's heart sinks. _Eggsy._ What was he going to tell the boy? Nothing for now, he supposes. What could Eggsy do about it, on his own, from here on the opposite side of the ocean? Only brood about it – and the boy certainly didn't need any encouragement to do that. No, Merlin will tackle the issue when it comes and not before. At least if Harry's dead, he'll have plenty of time to consider the best way to break the news.

It's a morbid thought and Merlin is carefully pushing it away when he realizes that Arthur's moment of consideration has gone on just slightly too long. It's uncharacteristic – he's well known for his decisiveness. But then he does speak, brusque as ever. "What happened?"

Merlin mentally files the observation and launches into a quick summary of the events in Kentucky. On the spur of the moment he decides to elide some of the later details, implying without saying outright that the feed had cut off when Valentine first raised the gun. He doesn't know how he'd describe what happened after that – doesn't know if Arthur would believe him if he tried. Another issue to tackle if and when it becomes relevant. Or if and when he has something more than mere speculation to go on.

The tension in Arthur's manner eases as Merlin speaks. It's visible in the set of his shoulders, the way the angle of his jaw becomes slightly less sharp. Merlin has worked with Arthur for as long as he's worked with Harry, although they haven't formed anything like as close a relationship. Still, the signs are there. _Something isn't right here,_ Merlin thinks, and he isn't entirely sure how he knows that. But hasn't got as far in life – and Kingsman – as this without listening to those sort of instincts.

Perhaps it's only that there is more to this mission than he was told – perhaps Harry's new technology or abilities wouldn't have come as a surprise to Arthur at all. And yet operational security, as a theory, doesn't quite hang together. If that were the case, then why not restrict access to Harry's feed entirely? Merlin is the one who had brought the lead in Kentucky to Kingsman's attention, so they probably couldn't have kept the trip from him entirely, but Arthur could have given him some other mission to supervise in the moment, something to keep him distracted. No, it isn't that. But if not, then what?

There are too many questions and too few answers. 

"I'd like someone physically present to assess the situation," Merlin finishes, keeping his face impassive.

"Yes," Arthur says slowly. "Backup, of course. But..." Another uncharacteristic pause, and then, suddenly, "No, I don't trust the Americans. I've just received some information that leads me to believe Valentine has made inroads there. No, you must go yourself. Keep trying to reach Galahad, of course, but I want someone on the ground that I can trust."

Now Merlin's instincts are really shouting at him. Nothing about this makes sense – it will take him hours to get to Kentucky, even with their fastest jet, and god knows what could happen to Harry in that time. Surely Arthur has someone he trusts among the Americans, or else how would he have got this intelligence in the first place? 

"Aye," Merlin says slowly, trying to put things together in his head. "You think the situation is that serious?"

"I do," Arthur says, now sounding sure and confident. 

If Arthur wants him in Kentucky, Merlin thinks, then it must mean that the action is elsewhere. But what kind of action, and where?

"Keep it quiet, even here," Arthur says. "I can't be certain... Well, all I'll say is that I can be certain of you and Galahad, but that's all." 

"Surely you don't suspect the Kingsmen!" Merlin says, startled out of his internal contemplation.

"I don't know what I suspect," Arthur says. "I simply don't know. But there's something gone wrong here. Too much egotism, too much showing off." His mouth shapes itself into an expression of such classically British upper-class distaste that Merlin half expects him to produce a silver spoon and brandish it as a weapon. It's not an unfamiliar speech, not coming from Chester King, but it seems out of place in the conversation – a decoy, somehow.

"We aren't what we once were," Arthur continues. "And therefore we may be vulnerable."

Merlin weighs the idea of just outright asking what the hell is going on, but that's more in Harry's line of action, not his. That doesn't mean he isn't determined to get to the bottom of this, but he'll do it his own way.

"I'm sure you're right," Merlin says, keeping his voice professional, perhaps a bit resigned. As if he disagrees but isn't going to bother arguing about it because Arthur is his superior and anyway they're on the same side. As if he thinks that there'll be plenty of time to have the argument later. 

Learning how not to argue had been one of the hardest lessons for him, as a young Kingsman, but it was a lesson that had stuck. What he needs is information, and the best way to get it is to make Arthur think he's out of the game. "I'll go to Kentucky," he says. "I'll go dark, just to be certain this remains confidential, then take control of the situation there and bring Galahad back with me."

"Good, good," Arthur says. "Keep me abreast of what you discover, and we can discuss next steps when you return."

Merlin nods. It takes discipline to make himself turn and walk away, but he isn't short of that. He closes the door behind him, keeps his face impassive as he goes back down the hall. There are cameras here, he knows – he'd put them there. Only when the door of his office is safely closed behind him does he let himself sag and run one hand over his face. 

\-----

For the first time in a long time, Gazelle is afraid.

She's been working with Rich for nearly five years now, progressing from guard to head of the security squad to personal bodyguard. She knows what people think, of course – that Valentine had picked her because she was weak, that he had earned her loyalty by building her up again in his own image. That he'd offered her sex or money or just a chance to be someone other than herself.

But she also knows the truth. He'd been watching her well before the accident, back when she was just Elena Kolarov, just starting to make a name for herself in MMA and the sort of dance that was more fight than pretty skirts. He'd come to a few matches, watched just as a member of the audience as she took home the lightweight title once and then twice. Watched again in her first solo dance role.

Then after the accident he'd come to see her in the hospital, made inane small talk while he watched her further, taking in what she said and what she didn't say. He'd looked into her eyes and seen something of himself there.

He'd asked her what she wanted. She said, "Revenge."

Three days later he'd brought her the gun – his hand around the butt had been far more tentative than her own.

She thinks of herself as Gazelle now, the last of Elena gone with her legs. She doesn't miss the girl who had been before, but neither does she regret her. What is, is.

She levers herself upright; it takes a moment to figure out the correct balance now that her legs are tangled together, but only a moment. Then she is up, turning to command the guards that are even now staring dumbly at the place where the Kingsman had been. They are all muscle; not even one of them has enough backbone to take the initiative, even now.

They hadn't planned for this – for Rich to be dead and her still alive. Perhaps because she hadn't imagined a world in which someone could kill him without going through her first.

But what is, is.

She looks down at Rich's body. The blood doesn't matter to her, or the lack of his face. She hadn't loved his face. It was what he'd done that counted, and now she owes it to him – to herself – to finish what he'd started.

She needs his handprint, though; there's no getting around that. Handling that will be unpleasant. Still. He wouldn't want her to be… sentimental.

"Bring him," she says crisply. And then, when none of them moves, she picks the one that looks the stupidest and points at him. "You. Bring him. Now."


	5. Chapter 5

"Have a seat, Miss Morton," Arthur says, gesturing her to the leather chair in front of his desk, and then, "Lancelot, that is."

Roxy sits, crossing one leg over the other and smoothing her face into an expression of polite attention with the ease of long practice. The 'Miss' grates, of course it does, but it isn't worth making a fuss over, not when this is Arthur. He'd congratulated her last night with every appearance of sincerity, too, so she'll have to cut him a little slack even if his sexist bullshit is too ingrained to disappear immediately.

And she _is_ Lancelot. The name makes something fierce rise in her chest; nothing else matters.

"I had hoped," Arthur says, sounding avuncular, "to give you a bit more time to settle in, to afford you some more specialized training. But something has come up that cannot wait, something for which I require you, in particular." He sets his hand on a thick file folder that rests on the corner of the desk, looks down at it and then up to meet her gaze. "We have a rogue in Kingsman."

Roxy sucks in a breath, but manages to restrain herself from speaking. 

"I see that I've shocked you," Arthur says. "I assure you that it was a shock to me as well. I've had my suspicions, of course, but nothing concrete. Then today… He threatened me. I'm afraid that there's no doubt about it now. But you understand, of course, why I cannot give this mission to anyone else." 

Roxy thinks to protest – there is Percival, her colleague now instead of merely Alistair, who is skilled as well as dedicated to the organization – but before she can do more than open her mouth Arthur carries on, obviously anticipating her objections. "There are those I trust absolutely – Percival is one such, of course, of course. But I could not set him, or any of them, against someone that they have known for twenty years, someone they have counted as a friend. Loyalty is everything here among the Kingsmen. To have that betrayed… I don't know how they might react. I don't think any of us can know that, until we are faced with it."

Roxy considers this for a moment, then nods, conceding the point. 

"And so I need your impartiality as much as your skill," Arthur continues. "I am entrusting you with this because I know that you will not hesitate. You will not be… sentimental."

"I won't," Roxy vows. Her back stiffens. "You can count on me, sir."

"Excellent," Arthur says briskly. He slides the folder to her across the desk but doesn't lift his hand. "He'll be in the city, I should think. At least to start with. Everything you need to know is in here; there is some recent information at the end. This is for your eyes only. I've let Merlin branch know that you are to have a standard tech package and anything else you desire, but they don't know the details of your mission and they don't need to know. "

"Yes, sir."

"Report back to me when the problem is handled." The tone of his voice leaves no doubt as to his meaning. 

"Yes, sir," Roxy says again, and now he lets her take the folder.

"Dismissed."

\-----

Eggsy stands gaping at the place where Harry had been for nearly a whole minute before he shakes himself out of the paralysis. His hand is clenched around the keys Harry had given him, his other hand around the pistol. Abruptly he stuffs these into his pockets and then turns away from the bed. 

The laptop is still on the desk in the study. Eggsy scoops it up under his arm and folds it shut, tugging out the cord from the socket and coiling it up swiftly. He can feel the anger building in the pit of his stomach, slow but inevitable. 

"Don't waste time. Don't trust anyone," Harry had said – and all of that with a dark smear of blood down the side of his face. "And don't you dare get yourself killed."

_Fuck that,_ Eggsy thinks as he goes down the stairs. Yeah, he'll get his mum and Daisy somewhere safe, but after that he sure as fuck ain't going to sit back and wait around for the world to go to shit. No, he's in this now. Nevermind that he isn't a Kingsman. Nevermind that he hasn't got a fancy suit or a lighter grenade or even any more ammunition than what's in the pistol.

He's going to prove to Harry that he can help, that he doesn't need to be willing to kill his dog like some sort of sick fuck just to be good enough to help people. He's going to prove that he's worth something. 

Whether Harry likes it or not.

\-----

Roxy goes down to Merlin branch, careful to look purposeful but not too eager or too apprehensive. This is a training mission – that's the impression she wants to give. If it's anything else, people might begin to ask questions. She gathers the necessary tools and, after a moment's hesitation, changes into something a little less 'afternoon tea with father's business partners' and a little more 'prepared to see action.'

She carries the dossier with her the whole time but doesn't open it until she's seated, alone, in the bullet train heading back into London.

A face looks up at her from the first page – good looking, in a classic sort of way. A hint of dimple in the cheeks, a bit of curl in the hair. It's a face she's seen occasionally during her training, but always at a distance. Galahad. 

At one level the file is much as she might have expected: education at Eton and then Cambridge, brilliant enough to draw attention to himself in the right circles but also canny enough to hold some of it back, which was what made the right circles know he was interested in clandestine work. Went to a consulting firm out of university but was recruited for Kingsman relatively soon after that. Passed most of the tests with ease, although some slight difficulty with the more covert tasks. A tendency towards flamboyance, but otherwise brave enough, skilled enough, sharp enough to win the spot as Galahad.

After that, a string of missions of increasing complexity: surveillance, information gathering, a stint as handler for three months in order to know what happened behind the scenes, a relatively straightforward assassination, busting a drug ring and handing the evidence to the proper authorities instead of taking care of the problem himself (a lesson in subduing arrogance), and then at last a mission where he was allowed to take full responsibility.

There are more pictures deeper in the file, some pleasant – the hair curl had been more pronounced in the younger years – and some unpleasant. The results of missions gone wrong, or worse, the results of missions gone right. Moments when he'd obviously been trying to send a message to the enemy: 'Stop now, or I'll do worse than this.' Moments when he'd seen something he didn't like, and he _had_ done worse.

She can see a pattern here. Ruthlessness. A willingness to use violence without restraint, an easy willingness to use cruelty or sex as needed. Roxy was prepared to use all of those things, too, but she doesn't think she'll ever do so without deliberation. She doesn't think she'll ever enjoy it. She wonders if Galahad ever enjoyed it. She thinks he probably did.

Towards the back, there is a profile of his most recent mission, the string of kidnappings and their connection to Richmond Valentine. The mission at first had been merely to follow up with one of the alleged victims, to assess the circumstances of his kidnapping and unexpected return, his connection to the old Lancelot's death. But then Valentine had come onto the scene. Galahad had gone to his mansion, allegedly for fact-finding; very little detail of that interaction had been recorded, but Galahad walked away from it, unlike most. What _had_ been recorded was apparently enough to let the creator of the mission profile get the gist of it. Elimination of human life on an epic scale. 

It makes her sick even to contemplate it. To have one of Kingsman turned traitor was bad enough, but to have him turn for something like this is worse. Much worse. 

There is a handwritten note at the bottom of the last page, indicating that the broader situation is under control and Valentine is no longer a threat, but that Galahad is still at large. 

And then, when Roxy turns the page over, there is something else.

It's written rather than typed, in that same precise but masculine hand. "The agent appears to have acquired advanced technology well beyond what Kingsman has developed. Little is known about this technology, but witnessed abilities include mental manipulation of matter and nearly-instantaneous teleportation across large distances. Teleportation causes as yet unspecified issues with electrical equipment within a small radius. Primary aim of your mission should be to subdue the agent, but secondary goal is to investigate this technology and, if possible, obtain it for the organization."

"Wait," Roxy says. "Hang on, hang on. What the _fuck_?" 

\-----

"What's this all about?" It isn't the first time Eggsy's mum had asked that question – in fact, she's been asking it more or less continuously since Eggsy had turned up and bustled her and Daisy out of the house and into Harry's car. 

"Look," he says, sidestepping the question just as he has every other time. "In here." A rusted door gives way to a dark warren of rooms, scattered with rubbish and thoroughly tagged with graffiti. It had once been a machine shop, Eggsy remembers, but the owners had run into financial trouble and abandoned it, which meant that the whole building, above ground and below, had quickly become a sort of junkies' paradise. Then, two years ago, he and Jamal and Ryan and a few other boys from the estate had found it and cleaned out a couple of the basement rooms for their own use. They'd pooled together cash for a good lock and thus far the junkies hadn't bothered to reclaim the space. 

He's pretty sure this wasn't quite what Harry had been imagining when he had told Eggsy to get out of the city – but there's no time to go out into the proper countryside and anyway he hasn't the faintest idea where he could take them that would be safe. This will have to do. It isn't exactly all horses and fields, but it's underground, and he's never managed to get a signal in all his years of coming here, so it's probably safe enough.

"Eggsy," his mum says, the doubt obvious in her voice. "This ain't a good place for Daisy."

"It's better in here," Eggsy says, unlocking their corner of the basement and ushering her inside. The look on her face eases a little when she sees how clean it is, the worn out but tidy sofa in the corner. "And you won't have to stay long."

"How long?" his mum says, hitching Daisy up on her hip. "Baby, you know I've got to go to work tomorrow."

"Dunno yet," Eggsy admits. "Just a couple of days, I think." He slings the bag off his shoulder and drops it by the end of the sofa – there's a few days' food in there, the best he could grab at the corner shop closest to home. And the place has water and power, though he's not entirely sure how Ryan had managed that.

"A couple of days!"

"Promise me you'll stay until I come back, or—" He swallows. "—until someone comes with a message from me." 

"My job—"

"Mum, forget about the bloody job!" he says, suddenly losing patience. "If you go out there you could die."

"Eggsy, really, what's this all about? You've got to tell me _something._ "

"You know I can't," he says. It comes out more pleading than he'd like. He hates lying to her but the thing about trying for a spot in a secret spy agency is that you can't actually tell anyone you're doing it. 

"Just like you can't tell me where you've been for the last ten months," she says, scowling. "Working for a _tailor_ – I'm not stupid, you know."

Eggsy hesitates, then turns to take her by the shoulders. "Just like that," he says. "Mum, if you don't stay here, Daisy could die." It's a low blow, but he knows it will work – and it does, he can see that in her face.

"Two days," she says. "I'm giving you two days – I'll call in sick tomorrow but that's it." She balances Daisy with one hand and tugs her phone from her pocket, but Eggsy snatches it out of her hand before she can protest. 

"This one of them new ones, right? Free calls, free texts?"

"Yeah," she says.

"I'll take it, then," he says. "I'll call in sick for you."

" _Eggsy._ "

"It's in the phone," he blurts. He'd promised Harry to keep Kingsman's secrets and he'd done his best. But this is his mum and she _isn't_ stupid and he's got to tell her something. "It's… the thing that's gonna go bad, it's in the phones. That's why you gotta stay down here. And I can't tell you any more than that, okay?"

"I—" his mum says, and then, "All right. All right." He half expects her to ask about Dean, whether he'll be safe, but she doesn't. Eggsy would like to think it's because she'll happily be shot of that arsehole, but more likely it's just that she loves Eggsy too much to make him answer that question.

" _Thank you_ ," Eggsy says, for that, for everything. He leans in, gives Daisy a kiss on the forehead. She gurgles happily at him, smacks his face genially with one chubby hand, and it's a wrench to tear himself away. He doesn't want to leave them, wants to be here to ensure their safety personally. But it won't work like that. He's got to take care of the real problem. 

Maybe this is what Harry had felt like, when he'd kissed Eggsy goodbye. Was that why he'd done it, because he loved him and still known he'd had to go? Was it that Harry had worked out how Eggsy felt about him, and wanted to give him something to hold onto in case they both fucking died out there? Was it just some posh bloke version of farewell, as if they were all still stuck in 1945 or France or both? Eggsy has no idea – and he knows he's got bigger things to worry about right now, but he's desperate to know the reason behind that kiss. 

He wants to think that Harry had kissed him for the same reasons he's kissed Daisy. That Harry loves him, that he wanted to protect Eggsy, and that he thought he could do it best by leaving.

The difference is, Daisy really can't help, really does need to be hidden away somewhere safe until all this is over. But Eggsy _can_ help, and that means he has to go. 

"I'll be back as soon as I can," he promises, and then he leaves the room and locks them in.


	6. Chapter 6

Merlin's office is clean – over the years he's made a habit of sweeping it for bugs daily and he sweeps it again now, just to be certain. In the past he'd chalked it up to the instinctive paranoia of a man who worked for a secret spy organization, but now, suddenly, it seems actually to be necessary. 

For the sake of misdirection he sends a request for a plane to be prepared – the most useful trans-Atlantic plane is already gone, having taken Harry to Kentucky, but they have another which can do the trip as well provided it stops over in Iceland. It's easy enough to put in the order for that. Next, an obscure setting on his tablet switches the cameras off, and his connection to the network anonymized through a series of random paths until it appears to be coming from a junior staff member who doesn't actually exist. It's another tool he'd set up years ago, though this one was for the purpose of monitoring the activities of the tech staff. Random activity checks were the best method of ensuring that they took confidentiality seriously; he'd had to reprimand quite a few, over the years, and even fire two with substantial application of the amnesia dart.

Once it's done, though, he hesitates, unsure of the best path to the information he needs. Does he look at what Arthur is doing now, or scan backwards through his history or Harry's? Does he look for documents or camera footage, or something more financial? Any of these seems plausible – if Arthur and Harry have been working on something confidential, they'll have met, they'll have recorded things, they'll have spent money. Some of that will undoubtedly be hidden, but not all of it. Chester has been out of hands-on work for too many years, and Harry is good, but he isn't _that_ good.

Merlin sets a few searches running and turns to the camera footage while they process. An hour back, to start, though he sets the playback at high speed to cover as much ground as possible. For the first fifteen minutes there is nothing of interest to see and Merlin watches it with only half an eye while he skims through other sorts of records. But then there is a moment when Arthur's bland countenance changes, and Merlin's hand moves to slow the footage before he is even conscious of it.

Arthur looks _eager_. 

It isn't a look that Merlin has seen on that face in a long time. Generally it's simply dignified professionalism, or perhaps a wry smile or a vaguely pleased look when a mission is concluded satisfactorily. Not this sly eagerness. 

From the camera angle he can only see Arthur's face, not his screen, so after a moment of consideration Merlin pulls up the data feed, then has to suck in a sharp breath at what he discovers.

Arthur was watching Harry's glasses feed. 

Why had Arthur pretended not to know anything about what happened there? Why not say that he, too was concerned, or even that he _wasn't_ concerned, if he had more knowledge about Harry's newly-demonstrated abilities?

The feed cuts off a few minutes later, just at the same moment it had for Merlin. More to the point, the cameras from Arthur's office cut out then, too, and when he checks the current feed he finds that it's still cut off.

_Hmm._

Merlin looks at the footage from his own office, but it's still there. It's hard to watch himself recoil in horror, hard to watch the hint of desperation on his face as he tried frantically to get the feed back. But it's there, right up until the moment when he'd come back and switched the cameras off manually. What does that mean?

_Harry's here,_ Merlin thinks. It's utterly mad, of course – Harry is in Kentucky, _had been_ in Kentucky. But then again, given what he'd been able to do there, is it really so much of a stretch to think that he could have crossed the Atlantic in seconds? Whatever technology he's using is miles beyond what Merlin can even begin to imagine. 

Merlin tries Harry's body trackers again but they're still dead, starting from the same moment in Kentucky when the video feed had cut out. He has no idea if it's deliberate; it's supposed to be impossible for any of the knights to meddle with the trackers without his supervision. But even the impossible seems possible now. Still, if it were intentional, why choose that moment? Why not _before_ the whole thing kicked off? It makes no sense.

Nothing makes sense.

He scrubs his hands over his face, then takes them away and pulls up a few feeds from around the manor. There are Bors and Geraint, fresh from a sparring session and walking together in the direction of the briefing room. There is Morgana, running a handler training in the back office. There is the new Lancelot, looking quite determined and heading towards the supply center – Merlin spares a moment to wonder why she's so intent, whether one of the other knights has given her a project already – but then he spots Arthur in another hallway.

Arthur is moving swiftly but surely, and Merlin's hands flash through a series of commands to keep up as Arthur takes a left, a right, another right, a left. He passes through one of the empty briefing rooms and then circles around to pass through it in the other direction. There are a few staff members in the halls now and Arthur acknowledges them with a brief nod, but nothing more. Once he's out of sight of each, though, he changes direction; it's one of the most basic techniques for shaking a tail, and it's definitely conspicuous to see Arthur using it here inside the manor.

_Where's he going?_ Merlin wonders, but he keeps tracking and eventually Arthur seems to settle on a destination, turning into a back hallway that leads to the garage. The inner hallways are all soft-lit to keep the manor looking stylish (for a given definition of the word 'style'), but the garage is lit by fluorescents, functional rather than elegant. When Arthur passes through the door, the light hits him in full force, and that's when Merlin sees it.

The scar on the side of his neck.

It takes half a second for the memory to connect; when it does his heartbeat starts to race, and if he could reach through the screen he's pretty sure he'd be lunging already, getting his hands around Arthur's neck with a shout of "Traitor!"

The impulse passes almost as swiftly as it had come, replaced with the dispassionate analysis that comes in moments of crisis. It surprises him, a little, how easy it is to accept this revelation as truth. If it were one of the other knights he might have doubted himself, worried at it, going back over all the bits of evidence that led him to the conclusion. But Arthur… he can believe it. Which makes him think that maybe he'd been considering it already, in the back of his mind.

He wonders when it had happened. He wonders _what_ had done it – what could Valentine possibly have offered to turn Chester King? Valentine who was, after all, nothing more than a jumped up little bit of American new money to someone like Chester, and black besides. Not money, he didn't think. Not sex. Power, of course, is always the most likely, but what kind of power? Valentine's speech to Harry, back at his mansion, had given a glimpse of his agenda. The moments outside the church had given a little more. So Chester got, what? The power to decide who lived and died. Yes, that makes a depressing amount of sense.

What remains, then, is what to do about it.

He considers his options in a split-second assessment. He could slip down to the garage now; he has weapons on him, the usual ring and some knives and a couple of other things that occasionally come in handy in unexpected moments. And his hands, too – he could kill Chester with his bare hands. Take care of the problem at the source. He could let himself be angry enough that he might even enjoy it.

But no, no. What he needs is information. And he can continue his searches of the server while following Chester as easily as anywhere else. 

Merlin tucks the tablet into a pocket and, after a moment of contemplation, opens the top drawer of his desk to pull out the compact pistol that he keeps there.

He doesn't want to use it. But he will if he has to.

\-----

When Roxy arrives at the shop, it only takes her a moment to pull up Galahad's tracker data on her phone. There's nothing at all for the past hour or so – before that, it was Kentucky, which is baffling until she remembers the whole teleportation thing. But why the last hour is missing, she doesn't know. There are trackers in all his tech, of course, but also in his blood, one under the skin of his shoulder that's supposed to be impossible to remove without surgery. And yet the signal is simply gone.

For lack of any better idea, she takes charge of one of the Kingsman cars and drives to Galahad's house. It seems fairly unlikely that he'll actually be there, but maybe he'll have left something behind, a clue to indicate where he's going next. 

The front door isn't even locked, which seems like an unmistakable sign that he's been and gone in a hurry. Roxy had expected to have to pick it, at the very least, and to have to circumvent an advanced security system besides. But instead she can just walk right in.

She hasn't been here before but it's a familiar, intensely upper class sort of house – the kind of place she'd grown up in and fled as soon as she could – and filled with the sort of upper class junk that her parents had collected. There is, perhaps, a bit more personality here than in her parents' home. But not the good kind of personality. In the end it all just piles up as more evidence against him.

There are the butterflies, hung in groups of two and three and four all along one wall in the sitting room. They look beautiful, at some level, all bright colors and graceful shapes, but more than that they look _dead_. It's an endless mausoleum of things that hadn't needed to die, things that could have been displayed just as easily by a photograph or a painting. Then, too, there is the stuffed dog in the toilet. This must have been the dog he'd gone through training with, the dog he'd have had to be willing to shoot in order to get the position. To stick it up here, in the loo of all places – it's sick, that's all. Like a perpetual reminder that it had only lived because of chance, because of his benevolence. She wouldn't do something like that to Ginger. She'd been willing to kill her, yes, but for a purpose. To mock that necessary sacrifice by having Ginger stuffed and hung on the wall would have been disgusting.

Roxy works through the house, trying to balance speed with thoroughness. He has a head start on her already, but there must be something here that she can work with. There is a bookcase in the sitting room but everything looks too pristine and anyway there isn't time enough to hunt through them. She goes upstairs instead and checks his bedroom first – the closets, under the bed, the space between mattress and box spring. The study is barely more fruitful – there is a hidden drawer, but it's empty, and the papers on the desk that have been hastily pushed aside are not immediately relevant. Still, she stashes those away in her bag and heads downstairs again. 

On the way out, Roxy absently notes the two place settings at the table, neat and precise – and she stops there, in the hallway looking into the dining room, staring at it.

Eggsy had been here. The night and the morning before their last test, half congratulation and half last-minute preparation. Twenty four hours, just like Roxy's time with Alistair. Eggsy would have been so thrilled to spend the time with Harry – he'd never said as much, but she didn't need to be an agent to tell when someone had a crush on a mentor. Just the look on his face every time Harry's name came up would have done it.

How would he take it, knowing that his mentor was happy to kill off most of the human race just to keep himself alive? Knowing that his mentor was a traitor to everything that Kingsman stood for? 

Eggsy, who was nothing if not loyal. Eggsy, who couldn't even shoot his own dog.

She wonders – what had Eggsy thought about the dog in the loo? Would he have taken it in stride, chalked it up as just another one of those things that rich people liked? Somehow she can't picture him doing that. He must have flipped out, at least a little. It is genuinely weird.

It occurs to her then to ask when Eggsy first saw that dog. He's been here before, at least once or twice as far as she knows. And it's the downstairs loo, so he could hardly have missed it. He had to have known that this dog hadn't been shot – you couldn't have one stuffed if it had a hole in the head. So why had he failed the test?

Unless Galahad had wanted him to fail, set him up to fail by telling him some lie about the dog. But why? Why put him through all of that just to pull the rug out from under him at the last minute? Maybe for the same reasons he collected bugs, or stuffed his dog and hung it on the wall. Because he was cruel, because he wanted to watch Eggsy struggle and fight and fail. 

Or maybe Eggsy had been in on it. The thought sends a chill down her spine, and she nearly dismisses it out of hand. Not Eggsy, who'd stood by her against all those stuck up pricks, who never shut up about his little sister and how much he loved her. Not Eggsy.

But maybe it had all been a set up. Maybe Galahad had known he was under suspicion, had brought in someone else to stumble into places he couldn't go, to find things out, to plant bugs. Maybe Eggsy had failed the last test deliberately, knowing things were going to come to a head, knowing he'd done everything he needed to do already. Maybe he'd just been playing Roxy the whole time.

She doesn't want to believe it, but she forces herself to face the possibility head on. If Eggsy was in on it, she'll need to be prepared to meet him. 

She'll need to be prepared to do whatever is necessary.

At last Roxy turns away from the dining room, setting her shoulders back with all the purpose she can muster. _I've done what I can, here,_ she thinks. _Time to consider the next most likely possibility._

Her phone beeps. Roxy pulls it out of her pocket and discovers that the tracker on Galahad's laptop has been activated.


	7. Chapter 7

Harry wakes with his face pressed into the carpet. His whole body aches – not like he's hungover or like he's had a particularly thorough workout or even like he's been running for his life. He knows what all of those feel like, and this is none of them. Instead it's a little like the ashes in a grate after a fire, low and burnt and blackened. But the power, weak as it is right now, is still there. It hasn't worn off, hasn't dissipated while he was asleep.

_Shit,_ he thinks. _How long have I slept?_

He rolls over onto his back, suppressing a groan. A quick check of his watch and then of his phone shows them both dead, which is puzzling, but once he can make himself clamber upright and stagger into the hallway, the clock there shows that he's only slept an hour and a half. 

Harry can remember, now, the moment of his arrival in the safehouse. The power stuttering and flickering like a lamp with a fraying cord, pulled sharp and taut by the last jerk he'd given it to take him here. The moment when he'd known himself safe at last. The moment when he'd more or less intentionally decided to pass out.

He's hungry. This safehouse hasn't been used in a while and so there's nothing fresh in the kitchen, but two tins of chicken soup and some tinned beans are enough to ease the worst of it. He washes the bowl and pot, rinses the tins more out of habit than necessity. But at last it's all done, and he has nothing left to do but sit down and face the truth of his situation.

He can't stay here. For one thing there are the trackers he's carrying inside him, the one in his blood and the other implanted in his skin. No one's found him here yet, but he doesn't know how long that reprieve will last. For another thing, though Valentine is dead, Gazelle lives. She's almost certainly over the Atlantic by now, heading back to Valentine's mansion. Harry doesn't know whether she can activate the SIM cards remotely, but it seems unlikely – if that were possible, why go all the way to Kentucky for the test? No, she'll have to get back to England to use the controls.

Chester would know more. 

And there's the rub, because Chester _will_ know, given that he's still alive. Given that Harry, against all common sense, has let him live.

It was a stupid decision; perhaps it's the sleep and the food that allows him to see it, or just the benefit of an hour and a half's worth of hindsight. No matter their history together, Chester is the enemy now, and Harry ought to have acted accordingly. Not least because Chester has the full resources of Kingsman at his disposal, or because, being Arthur, there's no way to know how many of the other knights he might convince or have already convinced to join him. 

Harry should have killed him then. But he'd put himself first, had valued his feelings more than the mission. He can't afford that kind of weakness anymore, not if he's going to finish this. (The thought of his feelings inevitably reminds him of Eggsy, the way his face had lit up at the sight of Harry appearing in the study, the way the kiss between them had been so wonderful and yet not nearly long enough. Still, he squashes the thought firmly. Eggsy is exactly the kind of weakness that he can't allow himself, not when he might be tempted to protect him at every moment. Better that he's somewhere safe.)

His choice, then, is threefold. He could have the power take him to Valentine's mansion. There's undoubtedly heavy security there and it would draw attention to himself, but if he could find the machine quickly it would be an efficient solution to the problem. 

Or he could go back to the Kingsman manor, to settle his debt with Chester and to acquire a broader selection of weaponry. There might be information there – more detail about the implanted chips and the SIM card technology or more on Valentine's broader plan. But Harry is reluctant to return, not for sentimental reasons but for practical ones. There's no telling what Chester has told the others about him, given how much time has passed. And if any of the other knights _has_ turned, then returning would be putting himself in close proximity to an enemy he knows nothing about. He also doesn't think that Chester would have kept potentially incriminating information at the manor, given how many cameras there are. Too many of them know how to pick locks, how to conduct clandestine surveillance, so it would be a risk keeping things there.

The third option is more appealing. Chester's home is well known to him and it's secure enough that he might keep documentation there, probably locked away in a safe. And it's where Chester will go, if he needs to leave Kingsman in a hurry. He'll want his things, his clothes and his small precious mementos, the trappings of the upper class. 

Yes, that seems most likely. And if there's nothing there, Harry can try Valentine's mansion after that with only a small delay.

Decision made, he reaches into himself and finds the banked embers. The power is beginning to feel a little bit more natural, no longer the frightening alien that had taken him over in the church. It still doesn't feel like part of him, but Harry senses that perhaps with time he could grow familiar with it. He flexes it hesitantly and it responds right away, flaring up into a steady burn. It's tired, but it's there. It's angry. He needs it to be angry.

He lets it build as he washes his face and gathers anything he thinks he might need from the stash under the bed here: a few more guns, a lighter grenade (An image of Eggsy's face flutters through his mind then, the wide, delighted look in his eyes when Harry had told him what it was. He pushes the thought aside.) and a thin, undetectable garrote. He adds everything but one pistol to his bag and slings it over his shoulder.

Then, gun in hand, he stands in the hallway and pictures the outside of Chester's house from the perspective of the drive, the way he'd first encountered it all those years ago. He'd been so happy to be invited there, and he lets that emotion fuel his anger. He can remember standing at the foot of the stairs, thinking that this house didn't look so different from his own family home – the oriental rug in the entryway, the grandfather clock on the first floor landing, the little door hidden behind the stairs that no doubt led to servant's quarters. 

He can remember a moment in the library, Chester pouring him a little scotch and leaning back in one of his leather wingback chairs, making some approving comment about Harry's marksmanship tests. 

He'd trusted Chester, admired him, sought his advice and his praise. He'd been betrayed, utterly and completely. Rage comes easily at the reminder. 

The house has changed little through the years – Chester seeing no need to meddle with what he considered elegance. Harry considers the best place to appear and chooses that first floor landing, just beside the grandfather clock. Closest to Chester's study, where he might keep his secrets.

He feeds his rage back onto itself – betrayal has given him this anger and this power and so he can use that to make more. 

_There,_ he demands. _Take me there._ With a crack, he is gone.

\-----

It's typical, Chester thinks, pulling up the gravel drive at the side of his home. Just fucking typical of Harry Hart to send his entire plan spinning out of control.

If he'd had time, or even an inkling in advance of what had happened in Kentucky, he would have been prepared. Clothing, weapons, artwork, the few small sentimental things he wanted to keep safe during the maddened frenzy of the world's population. More important were his files, all the pieces of information he'd gathered on his potential enemies and potential allies. The rest he can leave to chance, even if the thought of his Monet being damaged fills him with a distant and terrible rage.

But he really must have the files. He'd deemed them too dangerous to keep at Kingsman – an assessment rather borne out by the circumstances, given Galahad's staggering propensity for getting his nose into things – and now he'll have to gather them as quickly as he can and then return to Kingsman for access to a plane. 

Gazelle hasn't set off the SIM cards yet. Chester doesn't know why – either she's worried about getting caught up in the effects of it, wherever she is, or perhaps it isn't possible remotely. He can only guess that he'll have a little time, at least. Enough time to grab the files, return to Kingsman, and take a plane to Valentine's 'secret' lair in the mountains. 

Chester punches the code into the panel next to the side door and slips into the hallway. It's tempting to linger here, to take one last look at some of his artwork, at the priceless oriental rug in the entry hall that has been in the family for over two hundred years. At the top of the stairs he heads for his bedroom, swiftly pulling a suitcase down from the shelf in the closet and packing what clothing comes immediately to hand. Some of the suits will suffer from the unorthodox handling, but it can't be helped.

Back out on the landing there's a grandfather clock, a relatively modern Thwaites & Reed that could pass for a classic 1842 – he has to stop there, at least for a moment, but he moves on to his study, opening the two safes there and pulling out the papers as well as his spare pistol. He shoves everything onto the desk and is just turning to grab the extra clips from the wall safe when he hears the unmistakable sound of footsteps.

He spins around just as a face appears at the top of the stairs. "You nosy little shit," Chester says, and reaches for the gun.


	8. Chapter 8

Once his mum and Daisy are all tucked away nice and safe and Eggsy's made his way back to Harry's car – which is, thank fuck, still where he'd left it and not even missing the hubcaps – he opens up the laptop. Eggsy's no fancy black hat, but Harry's shit-stupid at password security in the way of most people over the age of 35, and he'd left it open when he swanned off to Kentucky. Eggsy had turned on the feed out of anger at first, or maybe a morbid curiosity to see what Harry would do, whether he'd look at himself in a mirror somewhere along the way and Eggsy would get a chance to see the expression on his face. When he found himself nearly falling asleep he'd taken the precaution of changing the password so he could get back in if it turned off; it seemed like an extra bonus to think of Harry coming back and finding himself locked out of all his files.

He types it in, the new one: MyDeadDogThinksI'm@FuckingPrick

He rifles through the files looking for anything related to Valentine. There are other things here, some with tantalizing file names, but he ignores them with only a passing pang. The relevant material is skimpy enough – some background information on Valentine himself, dossiers on a few executives at his various companies and on Gazelle. A brief outline of what he talked about with Harry at his mansion, but nothing to tie that conversation to an actual plan. Nothing about the technology, although that's to be expected. Nothing he can _use_.

Except for one thing: a set of architectural plans for Valentine's house, pulled from the local planning office and annotated with Harry's comments about security features. 

_Yeah,_ Eggsy thinks. _That's where I'll go._ Because if there's anything about what Valentine had intended to do next, it will be there. 

He pulls up the address in Google maps just to get a sense of where it is – a ways out of the city, but close enough that he can get there before Gazelle's back in the country – then slings the open laptop into the passenger's seat and starts the car.

\-----

Roxy stares down at her phone with a certain amount of puzzlement. Neither of Galahad's body trackers is online but the laptop one is fully active – more to the point, it's showing him in a decidedly odd part of town. Not the sort of place she'd have thought he'd go, not even the sort of place he would have known _existed_. But he's there. 

She hurries back out to the car and plugs the phone into the dash. She's barely gone half a mile down the road when the tracker signal moves and the car's satnav adjusts. Galahad is clearly on the move but at least she can follow him this way, turning and turning again, circling around when the signal turns east. She can't tell where it's going, at first – not to the shop, not back towards his house – but twenty minutes into the drive it clicks into place in her head.

_He's going to Valentine's,_ she thinks, the address still fresh in her mind from Galahad's dossier. _Of course he is._

\-----

Valentine's gates are the shiniest thing Eggsy's seen in his life; he likes a bit of flash, obviously, but this is too much even for him. After months of living in the Kingsman manor he can recognize it for what it is, new money, a kid who grew up poor trying to make himself look rich and, inevitably, fucking it up. The kind of thing you do when you know you'll never fit in, so it's half a sincere attempt and half 'fuck you,' and neither of those is entirely successful.

There are a few guards on patrol around the wall, another hiding in a tree who is obviously bored as shit since he spends more time scratching his balls than scanning for intruders. Probably they're all counting on the height of the walls – fifteen foot – to do the bulk of the work. It'd be a fairly safe bet if it weren't for the fact that Eggsy had found a portable grappling hook in the boot of Harry's car.

It's still plenty light out but he doesn't want to waste time, so once the patrol turns the corner and Mr. Twig-and-Berries is looking the other way, Eggsy whirls the hook onto the top of the wall and scrambles up and over in thirty seconds flat, left hand on the rope and right hand carrying the pistol that Harry had given him. Yeah, maybe someone will have seen him, but by the time the guards get their heads out of their arses he'll be in, and both Valentine and Gazelle are somewhere else (in Valentine's case, hopefully in hell). Which means, most likely, that there's no one here who's actually in charge. That will slow any response considerably.

Eggsy's made it halfway across the grass when he hears the thump to his right; he ducks and rolls instinctively, and the punch from the man (no longer) in the tree goes over his head with an audible whoosh. He can't get too comfortable, though, because Twig-and-Berries recovers quickly and turns the punch into a lunge, wrapping his whole body over Eggsy's shoulder and twisting his head into a wrestling hold. 

The position gives him no room to get the gun up, so after a moment of struggling Eggsy plants his feet and pushes sideways, hard, so that he can ram the man up against the trunk of the tree instead. It takes two solid shoves, but on the second one he gets lucky with the angle and he can hear the crack as the back of Twig's head slams into the bark. His grip loosens and Eggsy eels out of it quickly, swinging back around with a left-handed punch of his own. It connects with Twig's shoulder, a glancing blow that does more harm to Eggsy than good, since it puts him off balance when Twig heaves upwards.

Eggsy ends up on his back – never a good place to be in a fight – with Twig's left hand scrabbling for the gun and his right raised for a punch. Eggsy swings his gun hand up and over, blocking the punch with an upraised forearm. He follows the motion with a sideways punch of his own; this one lands solidly on Twig's jaw and sends him reeling back. Once there's a little space between them, Twig seems to realize that he's not up against a common burglar and opens his mouth to shout for the other guards, but Eggsy kicks off the ground and up, catching him in the throat with one foot before he can make a sound. After that it's a relatively simple matter of dodging Twig's flailing hands and shoving him back against the tree so that he can cold-cock him across the temple with the butt of the pistol.

\-----

Roxy considers the problem of breaking into Valentine's mansion with professional detachment. The laptop signal had cut out a few minutes ago, but Galahad is here somewhere. Maybe he doesn't know Valentine has been 'handled' by Kingsman and he's here for a meeting; maybe he does know, and he's here to see what he can salvage. Maybe he's here for something else entirely. But Roxy very much doubts that he's hanging around outside having a nice evening constitutional.

Coming at the house from the front gate side of the property seems less than discreet, and she doesn't have a boat to come in from the beach, so she pulls up at the far side instead where the wall is half sheltered by trees. There is a tradesman's gate here, with an intercom. A Kingsman multi-tool lets her unscrew the cover in a few seconds; the electronic lockpick function takes a little longer, but eventually the light on it flashes green and the gate opens with an almost-inaudible click.

Once onto the grounds, Roxy hugs the wall and makes her way towards the house, armed with a gun and the multi-tool and a few other things hidden away in her trouser pockets. Once she has to crouch behind a bush as a patrol goes past – she has to restrain herself from sniffing at the poor security practices – but after they're gone it's a dash to cover the last hundred feet across the lawn to the house in the hopes that there's no one else around to notice her. When no alarm goes up, she heaves out a silent breath and sidles up to the french doors from the pool. 

These are, miraculously, unlocked. Inside everything is dark, but there's enough light coming in through the windows to show that the over-dramatic entry hall is empty. She can see, half-shadowed, an elaborate relief pattern on the wall, interspersed with hourglass-shaped sconces, and gigantic paintings – Roxy rolls her eyes at the Warhol – and then a long, swooping staircase up to the first floor. With no Galahad in sight, she moves past the stairs and begins a methodical examination of the ground floor.

The first door she comes to is a dining room, also dark, also too large and too overdone. There's a kitchen beyond it that looks almost entirely unused. The next is a home theater with a wall of DVDs along the back, big screen and projector and rows of recliners, the whole lot. It's dark, too – in fact, Roxy's beginning to wonder if Galahad is here at all, or if she'd made an entirely wrong turn somewhere about the whole business. If Galahad can transport himself miles away in seconds, as the dossier claimed, maybe he's been and gone already. But then again, if he can transport himself, why had he driven all the way here from London? It makes no sense.

\-----

Eggsy drags Twig-and-Berries into an ornamental bush and leaves him there. Really he's doing the man a favor – if he's unconscious when the SIM cards go live, he probably won't kill anyone or be killed. He skulks his way to the nearest window and reaches up, but doesn't touch the glass. From a centimeter away he can spread out his palms and hold his breath; a faint vibration tells him that the window has one of those alarms that can sense when it's broken or even touched too violently. 

_Fuck,_ he thinks, but he doesn't have time to agonize over it, so he abandons the window and edges along the perimeter of the building, testing each window as he goes and keeping his eyes peeled for some other option. As he passes around the curve to the left he finds a low balcony that he can reach with a short running start. There's a door there – not alarmed, and with a lock easily susceptible to Eggsy's skills with a bit of wire, another example of Valentine's piss-poor security measures – and a moment later he finds himself in an oval-shaped bedroom. 

Even in the low light he can see that the décor is as naff as the gates outside; there's a round bed in the center of the room and a dresser curved to match the shape of the wall, made of some sort of excessively stripey wood. There is a rack by the edge of the bed with two of Gazelle's curved prosthetic legs slotted into the holes. They don't seem to be the bladed type but Eggsy regards them with some trepidation anyway and takes care not to walk too close. One open door leads to the en suite bathroom; another door on the far side of the room opens onto a curved landing. 

Here there are half-circular doors leading off to other rooms. Eggsy keeps the pistol in his hand as he moves between them. First Valentine's bedroom, angled up to the second story on the outer wall and furnished with a rhombus-shaped wardrobe in the corner and a pie-slice bed; the duvet looks like it had been sewn together with glimmering gold threads. The room has a bigger en suite that Eggsy would probably have lingered to gawk at if he weren't on a deadline. Then a small library full of comics. Then another door which leads, somewhat incongruously, to a washer and dryer. Eggsy can't quite picture Valentine doing his own laundry – but then again, he supposes he might have had a hard time getting out of the habit himself, if it weren't for the various communal living experiences he's had with the Marines and with Kingsman.

There's a staircase up at the end of the hall, but when Eggsy gets to it he can see that it opens onto the roof deck – nothing useful there. The only thing left, then, is the grand staircase going down.

\-----

Roxy is just opening the door to the next room – Valentine's office, it looks from a glance – when she hears a faint noise. Not a voice, but not just the wind, either: something soft that could be a footfall. She ducks into the room and does a quick survey of what it contains – a desk and a keyboard and a bank of screens, all dark but for the little red lights at the corners. There is a filing cabinet against the side wall, with just enough room behind it that she can stand out of sight of the door. Roxy fits herself in, holds the gun at the ready, and waits.

\-----

The ground floor is – marginally – more tasteful than the first floor. Eggsy picks up the pace here, feeling like he's probably good to skip over a detailed examination of the dining room or the home theater. The next door is half open and when Eggsy peers in, he can see it's unmistakably an office of some sort.

_Bingo,_ he thinks, and reaches over to flip on the light.


	9. Chapter 9

Trailing Chester is easy out here in the country, where there are fewer options for covering his trail. The rolling hills mean that Merlin can stay well back and still be confident that he won't miss a turn off, and even though Chester's body trackers are off – just like Harry's – twenty minutes of driving makes it pretty clear that he's going to his home.

Merlin still doesn't quite know what to make of the missing tracker signals. As Arthur, Chester has the ability to go dark on his own initiative, but the timing just doesn't make sense. And it had happened to both trackers and both cameras in the same moment, which seems more like malfunction than anything else. Then again, as far as Merlin knows, Harry's technology could be capable of anything.

_Harry's_ technology. Merlin doesn't want to think about Harry's part in all of this, but the road ahead is clear and he can't avoid it for long.

The idea of Harry joining Valentine's cause is ridiculous, absurd to the point of impossibility. He's been advocating for expansion of Kingsman's remit for years now, the inclusion of a more diverse range of staff and a change in focus for their mission scope. He'd brought in Lee Unwin – he'd brought in _Eggsy_ , for fuck's sake.

Harry letting himself get recruited just to have an in with Valentine's operation is marginally more plausible, but then why the church? Why that last interaction with Valentine? Perhaps it had been designed to make Valentine think Kingsman was out of the game – but that seems unlikely, given how Harry had reacted in the church. Merlin can't believe that was faked, not with Harry so obviously out of control. 

No, Harry hadn't known what would happen in Kentucky. Which means he must have been betrayed by someone – and to Merlin's mind, it's far more likely that it was Chester than Valentine. Because Chester has the chip, because he'd sent Harry to Kentucky in the first place. Had sent him to his death and had watched with that eagerness on his face. 

Then again, if Harry had been betrayed in Kentucky and then come back to Kingsman unexpectedly, why hadn't he sought Merlin out? Perhaps he knows that Chester is the traitor, perhaps not. Either way, Merlin could have been – could _be_ – of real help to him. Why go it alone? Maybe Harry hadn't trusted him. The thought sits heavily in his stomach.

But the truth is, he simply doesn't have enough information to draw any solid conclusions, not now. It isn't an unfamiliar position to be in – working with Kingsman often means not having much to go on – but this is personal. It grates, more than it should.

His phone beeps, and Merlin glances at it out of the corner of his eye, only to blink in surprise as he sees that it's a notification of the alarm on Harry's laptop, indicating that it's open and online. And… nowhere near where any of the places he might expect it to be.

_For fuck's sake,_ Merlin thinks. _Will none of this ever make sense?_ He can't fathom what Harry might be doing in that part of London. Not to mention the fact that Harry bloody well knows the tracker is in his laptop in the first place. Perhaps someone else had got their hands on it. Perhaps it's just a decoy to divert his attention. Perhaps there's yet another accomplice to this farce. He pinches the bridge of his nose, then reaches over and switches off the tracker alarm. Chester is his focus now. Harry will have to look after himself.

It's only another half hour to Chester's home, a rambling pile of pale stone that was probably once a suitable family home. Chester has never married and his brother's family has long since moved away, but he's used the house for many social occasions over the years and Merlin is broadly familiar with the layout and the security system. He pulls up in a copse of trees at the near edge of the property, out of sight of the house. A few moments see him well equipped with a gun and a selection of tools, and then he's sneaking across the grounds up to the garden door. 

There's a keypad by the door handle, a red light blinking on the panel to indicate that it's alarmed. Merlin scans it with his mini-tablet and identifies the buttons with fractionally higher temperatures than the rest. A bit of comparative analysis gives him the combination and then he's inside the back hallway, pulling the door quietly shut behind him.

The mini-tablet also works as a longer distance infrared viewer, so he pans it across the ground floor and then up to the first floor. Chester is in one of the bedrooms, presumably his own, moving from one wall to the center of the room and then back again. _Packing a suitcase,_ Merlin concludes. The heat signature history indicates that Chester has gone straight there from the front door.

_He won't have kept his secure data there,_ Merlin surmises. _He'll have a safe. In his office, most likely, or perhaps hidden in the flooring._ Another scan with the infrared indicates a couple of potential sites, places where there are regularly-shaped areas colder than the rest of the house – one in the wall of a first floor room, another one thinner, horizontal, but mid-way up in the center of the room. Merlin's seen enough of these over the last few years to know that it's a drawer with a false bottom. More puzzling is the cold box in the hallway area that's wide and thin across two feet of flooring. Merlin has to think about this one for nearly a minute before he realizes that it's probably hidden in the bottom molding of a bookcase or something like. _Clever,_ Merlin thinks.

It's relatively easy to keep track of Chester's movements with the infrared viewer – he'd be a little worried about just _how_ easy it is, except that he's pretty sure Chester doesn't even know they have all these tools. If Merlin doesn't exceed his budget and the knights don't complain, generally Chester's happy enough. He's reserved his energy and attention for networking, the last few years. Big picture strategy, finessing Kingsman's relationships with other agencies and generating funds from various donors. All important work, of course, but it's made him a little out of touch with the day to day work. Something Harry has complained about many times. At least now it's working in Merlin's favor. 

At last, Chester finishes in the bedroom and heads for the study. He stops in the hall for a brief moment; Merlin can see the various temperature outlines shift as Chester opens the floor-level safe with a kicked sequence and then leans down to scoop up whatever he's stored in there. Then it's into the study proper, opening the drawer safe and crossing to the big wall safe at the back. 

_Time to move._

Merlin pockets the tablet and tightens his grip on the pistol, then goes up, taking the stairs two at a time. Moving this quickly means he can't keep from making a little noise, and by the time he makes it up almost onto the landing Chester is already turning, his expression changing from surprise to rage as he catches sight of Merlin's face.

"You nosy little shit," he spits, one hand stretching out to reach for the gun that lies at the corner of his desk.

Merlin fires at it, sending up a spray of splinters, and the gun goes flying. Chester dives for it; with the desk in the way it's too risky to fire again and so Merlin meets him halfway instead, scrambling up the last few stairs and then flinging himself into the room headfirst so that his shoulder slams into Chester's. 

They tumble down in a tangle of limbs. Merlin had expected Chester to be out of shape, the product of a decade behind the desk rather than in the field, but he's strong enough that Merlin can't overpower him easily. 

"Should have minded your own business," Chester says. He scrabbles for Merlin's gun, then gives up after a moment and slams him back against the desk instead; Merlin's head smashes into it and he sees stars, but he kicks out instinctively and catches Chester in the stomach, pushing him back just far enough to give himself a little breathing room. 

_Don't underestimate him,_ Merlin thinks. He tightens his grip on the pistol and kicks again. Chester grabs for his ankle but Merlin's ready this time and he twists aside, kicking backwards with his other foot to catch Chester on the back of the head. "Why?" he says. "So you could send me to the slaughter?"

"Of course," Chester says, rolling with the impact to swing himself around the corner of the desk. "Just like the rest of you pathetic sheep."

Merlin follows, flipping sideways as he curls around the desk so that he can see what Chester's doing. The other pistol is in view now, having come to rest at the far end of the back wall underneath the open safe. Merlin gets one hand on Chester's belt, hauls him backwards and digs his elbow into the back of his knee. It's a sensitive location on even the most hardened agent and so the noise Chester makes – somewhere between a groan and a scream – is extremely satisfying.

Chester rolls over, throwing Merlin off him with a great heave of strength and then following it up with a punch to the face. Merlin doesn't quite manage to avoid it and the fist smashes into his cheekbone. He tries to bring the pistol up – at such close range it barely matters that he can't aim with any sort of precision. But Chester knocks his arm away and it's only with immense effort that Merlin can keep hold of the gun at all.

Merlin brings his knee up, aiming for Chester's groin but getting his stomach instead; he takes the chance and shoves up, using the other leg to keep momentum for the push until Chester goes over the edge of the desk, limbs flailing. Merlin swings himself upright, pistol at the ready as Chester lands on the far side of the desk with a thud and rolls uncontrolled into the doorway. 

And then Chester is on his knees – but he's too far from the second gun, too far from anything else he could use as a weapon. From the look on his face, he knows it.

"You could still join me," he says. "Save yourself. Without me you haven't got a chance. Think of what power you'll have after the rabble are gone."

Merlin looks down at him. He'd like to say something clever now, something to express his utter hatred. But there's nothing that comes to mind, and what difference would it make?

There is an ear-splitting crack. Merlin pulls the trigger.

Chester goes down and doesn't get up again. Merlin keeps the gun on him for a long moment to make sure. 

When he looks up, it's to the sight of Harry's startled face.

\-----

The first thing Harry sees is the barrel of Merlin's gun. The power swirls, then snaps back on itself like a bowstring at the sight of Chester's body, his head all but gone, sliding almost gently to the floor.

It isn't the gruesomeness of the scene that stuns him; he's seen worse, many times. He's never had the luxury of reacting to a messy death. But—

"I was going to do it," Harry says. The words sound like they're coming from a distance and he can barely recognize his own voice.

There is a moment of silence. "Aye, lad," Merlin says finally. 

"I was ready," Harry insists. The weight of his pistol is heavy in his hand. Somewhere inside him the power is still quivering – he doesn't know what to do but neither does it, plainly. Perhaps that ought to be reassuring but instead it just makes him feel untethered.

Merlin steps neatly over the body, blocking it from view. When he puts his hand on Harry's hand and eases the barrel of the pistol downwards, Harry can't find it in himself to resist. He can't find it in himself to do much of anything.

"I know you were," says Merlin. He walks Harry backwards, sideways past an open doorway and a few steps down the hall to another room, a bedroom, bland and anonymous. He takes the gun out of Harry's hand – Harry hesitates a moment, habit, then lets go – and sets it out of reach on the nightstand. 

"Report," Merlin says. Not a demand, but not a request either. "From the church."

Harry opens his mouth and begins to talk. The church from the inside, heat and cheap perfume and hate so thick he could feel it against his skin. Something shivering – himself shivering, his heart, his fingertips – and then the moment when it tipped over into rage and then into violence. The gun in his hand, the knife, the endless selection of blunt objects. Using their bodies against them. Shouting and then screaming. Blood. So much blood.

Then outside the church, the realization of what was growing in him. (He can feel it stutter under his skin, half emotional reaction and half memory.) Valentine. The bullet. Gazelle, the guards. Safety – but it wasn't safe. It was Chester, it was betrayal. Then home, Eggsy (Harry keeps some of that part to himself, but he doesn't suppose Merlin is completely oblivious) and then to the safe house. Sleep, not enough. Waking. Food. The decision to come here.

To be able to describe his experiences dispassionately is a relief. The power settles into his muscles, his bones, smoothing out into something like stillness although Harry can tell it's the sort of stillness that just means it's waiting. Merlin gives Harry his full attention, but it's the sort that says he's working, that he's assimilating information. Not psychoanalyzing, for which Harry is deeply grateful. 

By the time Harry is recounting his departure from the safe house, he feels like himself again – or at least as close to it as he's felt in the last five hours. "I _was_ ready," he says, but Merlin just nods absently. 

"Tell me more about this power," he says. "What can it do? Transport, of course. Physical movement of objects. What else?"

"I—" Harry says, taken aback. "I don't know. I haven't exactly had much time to test it."

"So we should experiment now," Merlin says. It's matter-of-fact, but the power comes to attention again all the same. The hair on Harry's neck stands on end. He knows Merlin wouldn't hurt him, he _knows_ that, but he's already been experimented on once today, and that had been by Valentine.

But he can't say that. He can't— it's a weakness and he can't say it. Not even to Merlin. "We don't have time to test it now," he says instead. "I have to deal with Gazelle, I have to deal with this whole fucking _situation_." Chester's dead, which had been his primary objective. Yes, it would be good to know if anyone else at Kingsman had gone over, but Merlin can handle that far better than he can. "We can sort all this out when I get back." He knows he's winding himself tight again but it seems impossible to stop – it's been rage and exhaustion and rage and exhaustion for hours now, an endless cycle. It's just about time for the rage again, apparently. If he can go and deal with Valentine's machine at least that rage won't be wasted. "I have to go." He prods the power with an impatient finger. _Let's go._

_Where?_

"Go?" Merlin says. "Where, exactly?"

"To Valentine's." It suddenly occurs to Harry that it might not be at the mansion. It might be anywhere – it might be in a fucking supervillain lair, which is certainly the sort of thing Valentine would have thought was clever. _To where the machine is. The other machine. Like the one at the church._

_Where?_ the power says, more insistently. It wants something else from him. It wants… 

"Fucking shit," Harry snarls. Merlin takes a quick step back, lifting his hands in surrender, and Harry makes a conscious effort to tamp down on his emotions. "Sorry. Just. If I could get rid of Valentine's bloody tech _now_ …"

Merlin nods. "Yes, I agree, very sensible," he says, lowering his hands. "But…?"

"But I can't go there because I haven't been there," Harry says. "It needs a mental picture, it needs a memory."

"Perhaps just a tiny bit of further planning might be warranted, then?"

The word 'planning' seems so much less uncomfortable than 'experiment.' Harry nods resignedly. "What do you want to know?"

Merlin gestures him backwards and Harry sits down on the bed; it's an immediate relief to do so and he finds himself realizing that the hour's worth of pathetic floor-based catnap hadn't accomplished as much as he'd hoped. _After this is over, I'll sleep for a week,_ he thinks, and then, _Christ, did I really just say 'I'll sort this out when I get back?'_ He scrubs his hands over his face. _Well, at least I'm consistent in my method of being a complete bastard._ The power whorls over him in a gesture that he thinks is meant to be comforting.

"I'll try to keep it brief," Merlin promises, and Harry pushes away his self-recriminations. There will be plenty of time for those later.

"All right," he says.

"Can you read minds?"

_No,_ the power says – wordless, but immediate. Harry shakes his head.

"You can transport yourself, obviously. And take things with you, since you've been moving around with weapons and clothing. Do you think you could take someone else?"

Harry hesitates, but nods.

"How about more complex manipulation of matter?" Merlin asks. "Melting things, distortion of wood, shattering stone? Organic matter?"

This time the reaction from inside him is more complicated. "Hmm. Possibly," Harry says. "I think— it would depend on the material and the level of precision needed. Wood can definitely be done. Stone, probably. Metal seems easier than stone but I've no idea why. As for organic… I don't think I could do small scale work inside someone else's body, brain or— you know. Quick and violent, yes. That's just moving things around, really. But not targeted and that's true of the other things as well, I don't think I could adjust a circuit or a semiconductor, for example."

"You burn out electronics anyway," Merlin says, flapping an absent-minded hand.

Harry blinks. "I do?"

"Did you even check your tracker records?"

"As I said. Not much time to piss away on things I already knew." 

Merlin rolls his eyes. "They're off," he says. "Have been off since you left Kentucky. I think you must have fried everything within a certain radius because Chester's trackers went, too, and the video feed in his office." He doesn't put any emphasis on Chester's name but he doesn't hesitate over it either, which Harry appreciates. "The only one still going was the one on your laptop – it turned on about half an hour ago. Considering you were in the safe house in— the one in Dartford, was it?"

"Eggsy," Harry says slowly. The thought of him sends the power into a slow, bubbling turmoil in Harry's chest. "He was— I told him to take his family somewhere safe." 

"I'm not sure he listened, unless you count Peckham as safe."

Harry pinches the bridge of his nose. "When has he ever listened?" he says with a sigh. He can't think about Eggsy, not now. He straightens up. "Christ knows what he thinks he's doing. All the more reason that we need to move quickly."

"All right, all right. I think I have the gist of it, unless you can think of anything else. What's the angle of attack, then?" Merlin asks. "If we can't just go directly…"

"Try the mansion, I suppose. Unless we can figure out whether the machine is somewhere else. In which case we get as close as we can, and improvise from there. And if it's in Siberia, we're fucked."

"You've been to Siberia," Merlin points out.

"I was heavily drugged for most of that, if you recall. And it's a big place. More to the point, how do we find out where it is?"

"Hmm," Merlin says and then, thoughtfully, "We find some paranoid bastard who was in on it, and maybe he'll have done the work for us?"

"Right," Harry says slowly. His head turns almost involuntarily towards the hallway. "Good thing we have a convenient paranoid bastard."


	10. Chapter 10

Gazelle doesn't know what had prompted Rich to install his own chest freezer in the back of the plane, but it makes the plan of getting him back to the bunker – or at least the important bits of him – relatively straightforward. She had decided in the end that all she needed was his arms and that it would be easier just to transport those on their own. A little bit of impromptu surgery later, she'd left the bulk of the body behind. If she could have saved his brain— but it had been too late for that. The rest was just dead weight.

She makes herself look at the freezer periodically just so that it doesn't become too easy not to look. Not to know that he's there. 

The rest of the time is spent with her tablet – first, checking the satellites, checking the connections. She can't activate the signal from here, but she can make sure everything is ready to go when she gets back to the machine. Once that's done, she starts scrolling through the invite list.

They'd put it together over the course of several weeks – the preliminary version, at least. Brainstorming names, making educated guesses about which ones they'd most likely find receptive. Their lists had been different, a source of good-natured argument. Some of the most pleasant times they'd had together had been arguing over the invite list.

"Be honest, who are you actually going to want here?" she'd said.

"I want royalty and I want old money," Rich had said. "And you know why? Because I want all of those stuck up assholes to stand here in my mountain retreat and know that I'm the only reason they're alive to look at it."

'Mountain retreat,' he'd called it. As if it were just another ski lodge, as if they were all going to come just to stand around in designer athletic gear and look at the snow and drink expensive vodka.

Her own list had been quite different: fighters first, because they'll need not just people who can stand around and look intimidating but also people who can get their hands dirty. Scientists – climate change, of course, but also architects and biologists and animal researchers and oncologists and geneticists. Agricultural engineers. Chefs. Executive assistants (especially those attached to people that _weren't_ on Rich's high-profile-asshole list). A wide variety of techies with different skill-sets. Musicians. Artists. Writers. Teachers.

They'd both known that they'd need people for grunt-work, too, of course, but there would always be people who survived, people who didn't have phones, people in the developing world. There's even an entry for that, right at the top under Rich's name and her own. 'Misc. shit shovelers.'

The sight of it brings Gazelle out of her memories, and she looks over at the freezer again, then drags her attention back to the list. All of Rich's names are still there, and she wonders momentarily if she ought to go ahead and invite them all, stick to exactly what he'd envisioned even though he won't be there to see it.

_No._ She doesn't need that for herself, and it's a recipe for a tedious power struggle anyway. She'll stick to the overall plan not just in his memory but because it's a good plan, because she believes in it. But she's going to do it her way.

She goes down the list, un-checking names with quick, perfunctory tap of the finger. Politician, politician, money from oil, money from mining, money from three hundred years of British land ownership. Another three politicians. Royalty from various parts of Europe. People with money in corn and cocaine. A lot of people with money in weapons – she hesitates over several of these, but there are plenty of actual weapons designers further down and she's got no use for people whose only talent is oiling someone else's palm. 

The leader of Kingsman is on the list, too; Gazelle un-checks him with an emphatic tap of the finger. She doesn't know what the fuck Chester King had thought he was doing, whether he was testing his own tech or if he thought he was infiltrating or if he was just unlucky enough to have a subordinate who was more competent than he'd believed. To be honest, she doesn't care. If it _was_ tech, controllable tech, then she'd be dead already and the machine connections would be destroyed. If it was just bad luck, then who knows what will happen? She'll take it as it comes.

As for Chester King? Gazelle pulls up the manual chip detonation controller thoughtfully.

_No. Too good for him._ He'll have to take things as they come, too; he can die with the rest, in his headquarters or in his car or on the street. That way, he'll have at least a few moments to see it coming.

She minimizes the controller and goes back to reviewing the list. It's a tedious job, a long one. It's a long list. When she reaches the bottom she checks the time, then scrolls back up and works through it again just for good measure. Then at last, when she's sure, she hits 'send' and the list goes away, down the line to the mansion's mainframe so that it can start sending invites out into the world.

\-----

Roxy wants to spend more than a split-second taking in the sight of Eggsy in the doorway, but her body is already moving on autopilot, swinging out from behind the filing cabinet with the gun up. She catches Eggsy by surprise but he's just that little bit faster and they end up facing each other only feet apart with the desk between them, barrel to barrel.

"Roxy!" he says.

"Eggsy." Her hand doesn't shake, but her breath is coming more quickly than she'd like. "I didn't want to think it would be you."

Eggsy's mouth drops open a little and his hand dips; Roxy's finger tightens on the trigger but Eggsy swings back up again too quickly for her to take advantage. He looks unhappy, but resolute – Roxy knows that when he decides to pull the trigger he won't hesitate. She'll have to get what she needs as fast as she can. "Course it's me," he says. "Fuck, Rox, I was hoping I wouldn't find you here. Can't believe you joined up." 

"Why?" she asks. "Because you wouldn't?" He'd thrown that last trial – maybe he'd thrown some of the others, too. Either way, he'd let her win the spot as Lancelot. That shouldn't be the thing that makes her angriest. It should be the months they'd spent together during the trials, set against the selfish pricks in those first few moments and then forming something that she'd thought was a real friendship. It should be the thought of him turning against the organization that had given him a chance at a good life, a meaningful life. It should be the thought of all the people out there who would have been killed by Valentine's scheme. But it's the personal betrayal that stings most. 

"Cause I thought you was better than that," he says simply, and Roxy nearly shoots him right there just to take that self-righteous look off his face.

"Better than what?" she says, but he isn't listening.

"Harry said I couldn't trust you. I told him it wasn't possible. Guess he was right."

"Harry?" Roxy spits. "Your precious Galahad is nothing but a traitor, and he says you can't trust _me_?"

She means it to be a jab, a knife finding its way into a weak spot. But Eggsy doesn't look hurt or angry. He just looks confused.

"Wait, what?" he says. "Rox, Harry ain't the traitor. _Arthur_ is the traitor."

"Is that what he told you?" She snorts. "I don't know what's worse, you joining Valentine willingly or sending millions to their deaths without even knowing it."

"You think Harry joined up with Valentine? He ain't no snob like you and all the rest," Eggsy says heatedly. "He brought my dad into Kingsman, he brought _me_ in. No way he was going to join up with a bunch of old money pricks who think me and mine ought to just lay down and die. Harry _killed_ Valentine."

"He threatened Arthur."

"Well, _yeah_ ," Eggsy says. "Cause Arthur sent him to Kentucky to get killed. Some weird shit went down there, I know, but Valentine's dead and it sure as fuck weren't Arthur that took care of that."

"What happened in Kentucky?" Roxy asks; she knows it's a mistake, giving Eggsy's flimsy explanation even a moment's consideration, but his use of 'weird shit' is undeniably intriguing, considering the notation about unexpected technology at the end of Galahad's file.

"See for yourself," Eggsy says. "It streamed from his glasses. I bet it's still on the server, or I can get his laptop from the car and show you that way."

"Like fuck I'm going to let you out of my sight," she says. 

"On your phone, then."

"I'm certainly not stupid enough to fall for that."

Eggsy looks at her for a long moment, assessing, and then he lowers his gun.

"Eggsy…"

He sets the gun on the corner of the desk and flicks it away from himself so that it skids across the polished surface and comes to a stop somewhere behind her. Then he takes off his watch, sets that down too and pushes it away.

"What are you doing?" Roxy asks, and it comes out far more uncertain than she'd like.

"Proving that I ain't done nothing wrong. You see that footage and you'll know it's true. And you won't shoot me out of hand."

"You sure of that?"

"I'm sure," he says simply. "Tie me up if you want." 

His sincerity is so palpable, so unshakeable, that Roxy can't help but be just a little bit convinced. He hadn't been _this_ good during their undercover training. But maybe that, too, had been a sham. Christ, it's impossible to know what the truth is. Arthur is _Arthur_ , he's the head of Kingsman. He's spent his whole life running an organization dedicated to helping people. Why would he turn away now?

_Because he really is a snob,_ says a voice in the back of her mind. _He makes no secret of his disdain for the lower classes. Because he didn't get to be head of a secret spy organization by being nice. Because he's obviously ambitious, and there's no more power to be had at Kingsman now that he's at the top, and maybe he wants a challenge. Because he's outraged that Valentine has advanced technology that only he controls._ There were hundreds of reasons, any one of which could be true.

_But he congratulated me on being Lancelot,_ says another, smaller voice, and in the end that's what makes Roxy decide that Eggsy might just be telling the truth. Because if that's the most important thing Arthur has going for him…

"Sit," Roxy says, jerking the barrel of the pistol towards the corner of the room. Eggsy sidles over and drops down to sit on the floor, cross-legged, keeping his hands where she can see them. Roxy takes her left hand off the butt of the pistol slowly, waiting for any sudden movement, but there's nothing. She keeps the gun trained on him while she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone.

She hasn't had much practice navigating through the Kingsman server, not with unrestricted access, so it takes some time to find where the glasses footage is stored. But it's there, time-stamped only an hour or so past, consistent with the tracker data from Kentucky. Roxy takes one last precautionary glance at Eggsy and hits play.

The footage un-spools with horrifying clarity. Inside the church – it's almost enough to undo her burgeoning belief in Eggsy's words at first, but she can see it hit all of them, all the writhing bodies that slash and punch and rip. Then outside the church, with Valentine revealing all his plans. 

The file she'd been given was true enough, as far as those went. But it had omitted a hell of a lot. To a specific purpose, she's beginning to realize. To fool her. To make her think exactly what Arthur had wanted her to think.

_I'm an idiot._

But there are still things she needs to know. "How did Galahad do all that?" she asks suspiciously. 

Eggsy shrugs. "Dunno. Pretty sure _he_ don't even know, considering how he dodged the subject when I talked to him What's more important is that Gazelle is still out there. Flying back from Kentucky, at a guess. She can't turn on the machine yet – she would've done it already if she could've. But who knows what shit's gonna go down once she gets back here?

Roxy considers all of this for a long moment. "Well, fuck," she says, and then, "All right. What do we do now?"


	11. Chapter 11

It turns out that Chester had been, indeed, the sort of paranoid bastard they're looking for. Not only do they find a cache of weapons, Kingsman-issued and otherwise – this much is unsurprising, since they all have something of the sort – but there's also a thick sheaf of papers, each page covered with small, elegant writing that Harry knows almost as well as his own.

They divide the stack of papers in half, spread them out on separate corners of the desk in Chester's study (Merlin stands on the side with the body, a small consideration that Harry appreciates but no longer needs) and go through them as quickly as they dare. Only half of what's there is about Valentine, but it's a substantial amount of information nonetheless.

There are lists of those people Chester thought might have been given one of Valentine's invites and whatever of their dirty secrets he'd been able to find; lists of those who have gone missing, dossiers of their properties and other resources; roughly-sketched plans for afterwards, things he would need, things he would want. Information about Valentine, considerably more than was contained in the Kingsman files. Harry isn't sure how Chester had managed to conceal it all; from the look on Merlin's face, it's definitely something to be looked into.

Towards the back, they find what they need. A sheet of coordinates, a sheet of code phrases and answers, an attempt at a building plan for an honest-to-god supervillain lair – although this is barely more than an outline and some question marks. Bits of information gathered at different times, from different sources, Harry thinks. The way Chester had written them down tells him that. It's the product of a considerable amount of slow, careful work. Somewhere in the process of doing it, he must have talked to Valentine directly, committed himself, had the chip put in. Harry can't tell when. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Merlin scans the coordinates into his mini-tablet, then twists it around to show Harry the screen. "Austria," he says. "In the mountains."

Harry breathes out. "We're lucky. I've been somewhere not too distant." He puts two fingers on the screen and zooms in, trying not to let his foot jiggle with impatience. "A ski lodge." The two of them lean over the satellite map, considering, until Harry finds it. "There."

"Ah, yes," Merlin says. "For that diamond smuggling situation. Which miraculously required you to spend a week at a ski lodge."

"I made many invaluable contacts," Harry says mildly.

"I'm fairly sure it was only your cock that made contact with those people," Merlin says.

The brief exchange of barbs is familiar and thus intensely soothing – it makes the power ripple pleasantly under his skin. "And yet the experience made them feel quite positive about Kingsman, or so I'm told."

Merlin rolls his eyes. "So we go there, and then improvise. But improvise with what? Snowmobile, I suppose."

"A helicopter would be better, but I don't know if they'll have one. It's out of season." Harry checks his watch. "It will be tight. But we've done tighter. And if you're intending to say something about my cock right now, I strongly suggest that you reconsider." 

There's a brief gleam in Merlin's eye, but all he does is repeat, "So we go there, and then we improvise." This time there's a subtle emphasis on _we_.

Harry considers the idea – he knows it's possible to take Merlin with him, but is it wise? He could try to make Merlin stay here, stay safe. But that's a high-handed thought. Harry would like to think he's learned at least something about the drawbacks of arrogance in the last twenty four hours.

He says, "You won't be able to take any tech with you, not if it will just burn out in the transition."

Merlin shrugs, but something in his face eases. "Valentine will have tech – he _made_ himself with tech. And I'd be a piss-poor Merlin if I couldn't make it work with nothing more than someone else's equipment."

Harry inclines his head in agreement. "Fair enough. What about the rest, though? I have two guns and a handful of clips."

"Yes," Merlin says. "I'll want a grappling hook in case we need to make an unorthodox entry – there's one in the car and it's purely mechanical. We should take the code words and the floor plan, such as it is. Some of Chester's guns might be useful as well. It wouldn't do to run short."

"Does he have an umbrella?"

"It's very unlikely that Gazelle is going to invite you to a garden party, I should think."

Now it's Harry's turn to roll his eyes. "Yes, all right. It isn't exactly suitable for transporting via snowmobile, I realize. Go and get your bloody grappling hook."

Merlin tosses him a sarcastic salute, but he doesn't hesitate to turn away and go down the stairs. It's a show of faith that Harry almost certainly doesn't deserve, but it's grounding. Somehow, he hasn't managed to fuck up his relationship with Merlin entirely. Probably because Merlin was just too stubborn to give up on him.

He can only hope Eggsy will be as stubborn. They'd parted on slightly better terms two hours ago than they had before Kentucky, but he'd still been far more concerned with himself than with listening to anything Eggsy had to say. It will be a miracle if the boy doesn't tell him to go fuck himself in the ear – or some other, even more imaginative metaphor. If the snowmobile ride isn't too arduous, maybe he'll spend some of it trying to come up with one of them himself.

Anything that isn't the memory of that bright, beautiful face going sharp and closed-off with hurt. He'd had such hopes—

_You can still have them,_ Harry tells himself fiercely. _Get through this, go home and grovel and throw yourself on his mercy. He's too good not to forgive you._ Whether Eggsy would be up for anything beyond forgiveness is still an open question. But if he can keep the boy alive, at least he might get a chance to find out the answer.

The sound of Merlin's feet coming up the stairs forecloses that line of thought, which is probably for the best. Harry steps over Chester's body to meet him on the landing. "Ready?" he says.

"If you are." Merlin is carrying a large bag, slung over his shoulder. Harry stoops to pick up his own, then holds out a hand. Merlin clasps it. Harry pictures the slope of the resort, the trees wreathed in snow, the long low structure where equipment was housed.

_Yes,_ the power says. _We can go there._

_Go there,_ Harry says, and then they're gone.

 

\-----

 

Roxy's barely finished the sentence when the screen beside her beeps faintly and turns itself on. She spins around.

"What's it doing?" Eggsy says, rolling up onto his feet and trying not to let on just how relieved he is that she believes him. The thought of her turning traitor had left a horrible sour feeling in his mouth, and he doesn't quite know what to do with those feelings now. At least something is happening, which means he doesn't have to think about it.

"Sending something out."

" _Fuck_." Eggsy's brief moment of relief turns into terror. "The SIM card signal?"

"I'm not— no. Something else." She leans over to peer at the screen, then reaches sideways to bat Eggsy's gun at him. It slides across the slick surface of the desk, pushing his watch with it; Eggsy just barely catches the whole lot before it tumbles to the floor. "Keep your shit out of my way," Roxy says, not really paying attention, and Eggsy grins. He slips the watch back on – it's his own, not Kingsman's, but he hadn't known if Roxy would be able to recognize that – then puts the safety on the gun and tucks it into the waistband of his trousers before sliding around the corner of the desk to peer over her shoulder.

The screen displays a list of names, scrolling up one after the other in a slow, regular progression. At first Eggsy doesn't recognize any of them, but after a moment he sees one that seems familiar, and then another, and then—

"Ain't those two boxers?"

"Yeah, I think so. And that one's a musician. And that one—"

"Yeah, I've heard of him."

"What the hell is this?" Roxy says. "Something's being sent out… I think it's an email. Or a backlog of emails." 

Eggsy's stomach sinks. "It's the invite list." Roxy turns to look at him, obviously a little confused. "All the people with the chips in their necks, all the people he managed to convince. Gazelle's bringing them in."

"Shit," Roxy says. "We haven't got much time, then."

"Can you figure out what she's sending them? Instructions, or a location, or anything?"

Roxy's fingers move over the keyboard, but that just brings up a prompt for a password. She types something in, tentatively, but the password box just flickers out and then reappears. "Hmm." She closes the password box and then types something else, which pulls up a different sort of screen entirely. "Hmmm."

"Can you—"

"Shut up, I'm thinking."

Eggsy shuts up. He hasn't had much of a chance to watch Roxy work; they've spent months together, sure, but always concentrating on their own skills first and foremost. They'd given each other the occasional tip, because it was that or be a complete arse about it, and the candidate group was already so full of arseholes that it looked like this one porno Eggsy had once stumbled across late at night and that had left him emotionally scarred for weeks.

Anyway. That's really neither here nor there – the point is that he knows Roxy's good at this shit but he doesn't know _how_ she does it. As lines and boxes appear and disappear on the screen, he tries to follow along – some of it makes sense, but other things either go by too quickly or are incomprehensible tricks he's never seen before.

It takes her nearly twenty minutes before the screen flickers and changes from the lines of names into something that looks like an email message.

"Best I can do," Roxy says. "I can't get into the system itself, only the mail program. But we can see what's going out. Don't know how long it will last, either." She whips out her phone and takes a quick picture of the screen. It flickers again and displays another email, so she takes another picture.

Eggsy leans over her shoulder to read what's there; it's a short and sweet message – a set of coordinates and a passphrase and a time, just over an hour and a half from now. The screen flickers again, but it displays the same message. Only the email address has changed.

"That's gotta be it," Eggsy says. "Where she's going."

"And when she thinks she'll get there," Roxy says. "It's like an hour from now, Eggsy. How the fuck are we going to get to fucking Austria?"

"We'll get there," says Eggsy, suddenly inspired.

"How? I know you're good, but even _you_ can't drive to Austria in an hour."

"Oh ye of little faith," Eggsy says. "C'mon."

He leads Roxy up to the first floor and then up again using the stairway he'd ignored the first time around. The stairs lead up to a glass door that opens onto an outdoor landing. To one side there is a deck with a couple of lounge chairs; it's surprisingly tastefully decorated, considering this is Valentine. Then again, Eggsy reflects, Valentine's a tech geek. Maybe he doesn't use it.

Eggsy turns away from the deck, tugging Roxy with him. The other side of the landing leads to a large, square tarmac, and parked in the middle of it is a helicopter.

"You have got to be kidding me," Roxy says, but she follows him across the roof. "Can you even start this thing?" 

Eggsy is already leaning in, picking at the edges of the panel surrounding the key slot. "Have you got—" Roxy hands him the multi-tool. "Ta," he says absently. A moment later the panel comes off and he switches the tool over to a knife configuration, stripping the insulation off the wires. He snaps the multi-tool shut. "Hot-wiring's pretty much the same for everything," he says, handing it back to her. "Do it once, and…" He shrugs. 

It feels a little bit uncomfortable, talking about this kind of skill, the kind he'd learned on the estate, in the back streets. He'd never used it for more than joyriding, taking the piss out of some arsehole by leaving their car somewhere hilarious, but still. It isn't the sort of thing Roxy would have had cause to learn, until Kingsman. That doesn't mean she won't learn it, doesn't mean it won't come in handy (like now). And he isn't ashamed of the shit he's done. But not being ashamed doesn't mean everything has to be easy, either. He reaches out and twists two of the wires together; the engine roars into life.

"You got what you need?" he says, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the engine, and then, "'Cause I think those guards are going to twig that something's up pretty fucking soon."

"If they haven't already," Roxy shouts, rolling her eyes, but she jogs around the front of the helicopter and climbs into the co-pilot's seat. "Fucking come _on_ , Eggsy," she says, and Eggsy feels suddenly buoyant, lifted up by the power of sarcasm or something like. He tips his head back and laughs, long and loud and sincere.

Then, still grinning, he climbs into the pilot's seat and flips the door shut behind him. It only takes a moment to clip himself into the harness, grab the nearby headset and slip it on. "Ready?"

Roxy nods. Eggsy grasps the joystick – not a moment too soon, as he can see down onto the lawn below where guards are beginning to run across the grass towards the house. He pulls upwards on the stick, and they soar up into the darkening sky.


	12. Chapter 12

Flying a helicopter in reality turns out to be marginally more difficult than it had appeared in the selection of video games Eggsy had played in his teen years, so for the first twenty minutes he doesn't talk at all. Roxy is occupied, too, radioing back and forth with various flight authorities and trying to pretend they've got some sort of official clearance. Her Kingsman phone comes in handy there, giving her several emergency code numbers and phrases that get them through without being shot out of the sky.

Eventually she gets it all sorted and they fly on for a while without speaking. Eggsy knows he could break the silence himself, but now that the adrenaline is wearing off somewhat and he isn't preoccupied with trying not to fly into a mountain, other thoughts are creeping in. Out of the corner he can see Roxy casting him concerned looks, but it takes her nearly ten minutes after that to decide to say something.

"All right, out with it," she says at last. "You're giving off a definite aura of brooding about something and it's giving me a headache."

Eggsy snorts. He thinks about deflecting the question, but considering they're about to go into a fight together, maybe it's better to get it out in the open. "Did you really think I would've sold you out to Valentine? _Really?_ "

"I didn't _want_ to believe it," Roxy says. "But…" She shrugs. "I'm a member of a secret spy organization that a year ago I didn't even know existed. I was brought into Kingsman by my uncle, who I thought was a hedge fund manager for pretty much my entire life. I've spent the last ten months being taught how to lie and steal and kill, and at the end of it I had to shoot my fucking dog. So yeah, I think being suspicious is pretty much par for the course."

She looks a little surprised at just how bitter this comes out, but she doesn't take it back.

"Haven't you ever had _anyone_ you could trust?" Eggsy says quietly.

"No," says Roxy, and then pointedly, "Have you?"

It stings, but only because he knows she's not wrong. He loves his mum but she'd chosen Dean and kept on choosing him, even when he drank too much, stole things, dealt dangerous shit, set up an extortion racket on half the businesses in the area, split Eggsy's lip on a regular basis and even broke his arm once. Most of his teachers had turned a blind eye and even the ones that had tried to help hadn't gone further than making sure he got the occasional extra meal. Ryan and Jamal were good mates but they had been just kids like he was, not anyone he could rely on to take care of him. In the Marines he hadn't got far enough to form bonds with a squad. At Kingsman he'd been ridiculed and spat on and sneered at, thrown naked into the woods with nothing but a knife, dropped out of a plane with (he thought) no parachute, drugged, watched every second even in the showers… Some of that had been to make him stronger, sure, but some of it had just been cruelty. Which wasn't even mentioning the bit where they'd wanted him to shoot his dog.

And Harry… even Harry had fucked things up, not just that shit before Kentucky but when Eggsy was young, too. He'd promised Eggsy's dad that he'd look after his family and then he'd just given them a medal and disappeared and done absolutely fuck all until Eggsy was desperate.

"No," Eggsy says eventually. "No. But... I guess I can't stop hoping it'll happen sometime."

Roxy looks at him for a long moment, then sighs and reaches over to give the back of his neck a squeeze.

\-----

The lock on the door of the vehicle storage shed is decent enough, but no match for the specially-designed lockpicks that Harry carries in his cufflinks. Merlin's made quite a lot of tech over the years but he's particularly proud of these. They're just flashy enough to fit with the sort of cover Harry often wears, but not so flashy as to be worth any particular notice. Miles better than the tacky tie-pins that Kingsman had been using up until he'd taken over.

While Harry's re-fastening his cuffs, Merlin hauls the door open; it rolls back with a loud, alarming scrape of metal that probably is advertising their presence to everyone within a five mile radius.

"Oh, lovely," Harry says. "Why do people always make burglary so difficult? Are you driving, or am I?" 

"I am, most definitely," Merlin says, stepping inside. Fluorescent lights flicker into life above their heads. He can see Harry shivering a little, no doubt partly because of the cold – neither of them is dressed for the mountains but there had been no time to change and nothing to change into even if they'd _had_ the time. But Merlin's known Harry a long time. If it were just the cold, there would be a lot more complaining. 

_That power of his,_ Merlin thinks. _Fuck knows what it's doing to him. I've never seen him as he was ten minutes ago. Half-mad._ There's no time to consider consequences, though, not now. Skill will have to see them through. Best not to let Harry know he's concerned – it could make him either overcautious or over-bold. "You'd have us leaving by way of the ski jump, I'm sure," he says casually. 

Harry huffs, but thankfully he doesn't argue. "Which one do you want, then?"

Merlin casts an assessing glance down the row. This time of year the snow will be wetter so he wants something lightweight. "That one," he says, stepping over to check the status of its petrol tank. "Full enough for now, but we should bring a canister as well." Harry is hurrying down the side of the shed already, heading for the shelf where canisters are stored and then back again to sling it into one of the baskets at the back. Merlin considers hotwiring the snowmobile, then glances back at the wall beside the door and discovers a neat row of hooks, each with a key ring hung from it. "Sometimes they do make it easy," he says, snatching up the appropriate set of keys; when Harry turns to look, Merlin tips his head in that direction and Harry snorts. It's a good sign.

The snowmobile starts up with a loud sputter and Merlin swings himself on, dropping his bag into the other basket. A moment later Harry climbs on behind him and slides his arms around Merlin's waist. Merlin puts his foot down and the snow crunches underneath them as they slide out onto the darkening slope.

\-----

Roxy braces herself for a fight on the landing pad, but the passphrase from the email is enough to gain entrance, even with Eggsy in a tracksuit and herself all in black looking like she'd just come from breaking into someone's house. They don't even get searched, which is fantastic given that they both have guns and Roxy has the electronic lockpick as well.

A security guard leads them down a narrow hallway. There are other passages branching off to the sides; Roxy casts a surreptitious glance at each one but there's not much to go on, just grey brick and bland linoleum as far as the eye can see. The guard takes them to a pair of doors and pulls one open somewhat deferentially to reveal a large, opulent ballroom. The walls are painted with a mottled, sponge effect and it's lit all across the ceiling with actual fucking disco balls.

It's only half full, but Roxy realizes instantly why the guards hadn't looked twice at what they were wearing. The crowd is a mishmash of faces and clothes, more motley even than the décor. Some of them are in casual clothes but others have obviously been interrupted in the middle of working; Eggsy's ridiculous yellow jacket would have been right at home. Roxy spots a chef with a show on BBC Two talking to one of the musicians whose name she'd seen on the email list, and those are just the two she recognizes who are closest to the door – there are many more beyond. Most of them are chattering away with every appearance of sociability. Some of them are even laughing.

Roxy dismisses the guard with a gracious wave of the hand. Eggsy waits until he's out of earshot before tipping his head towards the musician and murmuring, "I'm sure as shit never buying _that arsehole's_ albums ever again."

"Maybe we'll get lucky and he won't survive it," Roxy says darkly. She touches his arm flirtatiously and uses the gesture to tug him out of the doorway into a nearby nook, lit soft gold with more of the sconces that had been in Valentine's front hall. The impression she's trying to give is two murderous arseholes congratulating themselves on having made it to safety. Eggsy gets it immediately, plasters a seductive smile on his face and leans in. It's slightly alarming to be the recipient of his 'posh girls love a bit of rough' expression. "Look," she says, shaking off the visual. "He's got to have the machine stashed away somewhere. Not here, obviously."

"Oh, I dunno," Eggsy says casting a sardonic sideways look at the ballroom. "It's the right ambiance."

"Focus," says Roxy. "Valentine was a megalomaniac, not an idiot. So we should split up, cover more territory. How d'you want to handle it?"

"Paper scissors stone?"

"You are a child," Roxy says with a sigh, but she holds out her hands. "One, two, three, shoot." She picks paper, Eggsy picks scissors. "Fine, what do you want?"

"You're better at tech, so you find the machine or whatever it is," he says. "I'll find Gazelle."

"You could have just said that from the beginning," Roxy says. Eggsy just grins at her and she flicks her hand at him. "Piss off, then, and go cause some chaos. I'll slip out a few minutes after you're gone."

She waits five minutes after he leaves and then slides out the door herself. She doesn't get far, though, before she can hear voices coming from the hall to the landing pad. The closest hallway is off to the right; she ducks inside and plasters herself against the wall, edging away. For a long stretch it's just hallway, curving around to the right, but eventually it opens out a little into a section set with doors on each side, spaced every ten feet or so. Each door has a small window more or less at eye-height (most shuttered with a metal panel) and an electronic keypad to the right side – it's pretty obvious that these are prison cells.

_Are these the people who went missing?_ Roxy thinks. _Must be. Why keep them alive, though? Hostages, I suppose._ What a depressing thought. 

More depressing is that on the far side of the wider section the hallway splits into three, and Roxy has no idea which of them to take.

Then again, maybe there's a source of information right here at her fingertips. She sidles up to the first door and tugs the panel over the window up. The room inside is just large enough to fit a small bed and a curtained-off corner that Roxy's pretty sure contains a toilet. There is a woman sitting on the bed, vaguely familiar, perhaps Roxy's age or a little older. She has warm blond hair that sweeps back from her face as she looks up sharply at the sound of Roxy's footsteps. She opens her mouth – Roxy gestures hurriedly for silence, and after a moment of hesitation the woman nods. Roxy waves her over to the door and says quietly, "Rescue mission. But I've got to take down Valentine's tech first, or letting you all out won't help."

"Yes," the woman says; she has a slight accent, something Scandinavian. "What do you need?"

"There's a machine, or a technical control system, or something like that," says Roxy. "The phones that Valentine's been selling – they have SIM cards in them that emit some kind of sound wave. It makes people crazy, murderous."

"So that is how he planned to do it," the woman says. "Bastard." 

"I need to find it," Roxy says. She indicates the three hallways. "Any suggestions?"

"Food comes from the right hall," the woman says immediately. "As for the other two… I think soldiers come more frequently from the center. Not always, but often."

"Left side it is," Roxy says. "Thanks. I'll be back when I can, or… someone will, one way or another." Maybe that's a bit grim, but the woman just nods. Roxy leaves the window open and goes left.

\-----

They don't speak for most of the ride through the mountains. It's partly because the wind is whipping at Harry's face, making his eyes stream; after a while he can get his right arm up to block the wind a little, but it's still almost freezing and he can feel himself shivering. It's partly, too, that the roar of the snowmobile is loud enough that they'd have to shout. Mostly it's that Harry doesn't have anything to say that he hasn't said already.

He can see now how Chester had been sowing dissent at Kingsman for years, pushing them apart from each other – not just Harry and Merlin but the other knights, too. More solo missions, more undercover missions. The Lancelot trials had become a personal competition, the candidates judged as more as a reflection of the knight who had nominated them than for themselves. Harry knows he's been guilty of this, too, pinning all his hopes on Eggsy, at first to prove himself right about expanding the class of candidates and then later to justify his vision for Eggsy's future. 

And he and Merlin hadn't worked a mission together in over a year, not fully; it was no wonder that Harry had got out of the habit of trusting him. _If we get out of this –_ when _we get out of this – I swear we'll change things. No matter who the next Arthur is._

He clings to that determination as they reach the end of the open slope and the mountains turn jagged; Merlin has to take things a little more slowly now that the sun has set almost entirely, winding his way through trees and upthrust rocks. The wind has worn most of these half-free of snow and they loom dark and sudden out of the shadows into the beam of the headlight. When Harry tilts his head back he can see that the stars have just begun to prickle into life above them. If it weren't for the noise and the cold and the ever-present fear of world destruction, he might even have called it peaceful.

He only realizes that they're getting close when the stars begin to fade out again. Then there are new lights, the wrong sorts of colors, brighter, closer. His mind works automatically to identify them, reeling off models of planes and helicopters. There are so many – all Valentine's converts. Harry has seen a lot of horrifying things in the course of his time at Kingsman, but this might be one of the worst simply because of the scope of corruption it reveals. 

The systemic problem bears further investigation, but not now. Because the quantity of aircraft tells Harry something else – that Gazelle has called them in, that Valentine's project is closing in on its completion. Harry reaches forward and taps Merlin on the shoulder, pointing upwards. Merlin looks, then nods and puts his foot down.

It takes another fifteen minutes to reach the rear of Valentine's base. There is a loading dock here, with three sets of metal doors – Harry tests each of them in turn, but they're all closed with heavy-duty bars from inside and there's no easy lock to pick or keypad to override. Merlin tugs a lighter grenade from his pocket and holds it up inquiringly. Harry frowns – the grenade will almost certainly destroy any advantage of surprise that they might have – but then nods in resignation.

"Well, if you'd rather impress me with your thing..." Merlin drawls.

There's a joke in that, but Harry's too frazzled to find it. The power is jittering under his skin, but he can't quite tell whether it's impatience or exhaustion. "Better save it," he says. "It's— there's only so much, and then I have to refuel, sleep and food and so forth. Still plenty at this stage, but given how little we know, I'd rather use the lighter." To be truthful, 'plenty' is probably overoptimistic, but there's no point in saying so.

"Good point," Merlin says. 

They retreat behind the bulk of the snowmobile, guns at the ready. Merlin flicks open the grenade and throws it; the resulting explosion is deafening, but when the noise subsides a little Harry lifts his head to look and discovers that the grenade has, at least, done its work, leaving twisted metal and a gaping hole where the center door had been. 

There is a red, strobing light visible inside, a distinct sign of some alarm they've set off, but there isn't an immediate rush of security forces and so Harry and Merlin scramble through the hole into the loading dock and then through the door on the far side which opens into a hallway. There are red lights here, too – hanging from the ceiling, flashing all in unison. At least the alarm is silent, which means Harry can hear the babble of voices coming from the hallway to the left. He looks that way, then turns back to discover that Merlin is examining a bundle of cables strung across the ceiling, leading from the loading dock down in the opposite direction from the voices. 

"Split?" Merlin says, indicating the right side for himself. Harry nods, but as Merlin turns away, Harry reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. Merlin looks back at him questioningly and Harry gives his shoulder a squeeze, trying to let the gesture express all the things he doesn't have time to say. After a moment, Merlin's mouth quirks up into an odd sort of smile and he nods, and Harry knows he's understood.


	13. Chapter 13

The ground crew has, at least, sense enough to give her plane priority in the landing pattern. Gazelle uses the approach to gather what she needs and comes down the stairs to the landing pad the second they are in place. The arms are in a large bag slung over her shoulder, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. Security meets her just inside the hallway door. 

"Report," she says sharply. 

"Nothing out of the ordinary," says the squad leader. "No one has arrived without an invite code and there have been no breaches of security."

"See to it that everything stays that way," Gazelle says, dismissing him with a curt wave; the rest of the squad falls into a sharp, military line against the wall as she passes them.

The door to the ballroom pulls back easily at her touch and there is a good crowd already gathered. The sound of conversation filling the hall fades a little at her entrance, not entirely into silence but into something more controlled, more watchful. She's met all of the invitees at least once during their recruitment and none of them more than three times, but she can already tell that some of them have begun thinking about how best to jockey for position. It would be amusing if the timing weren't so inconvenient.

And if she knew what to say to them.

On the plane it had seemed simple enough – get back to the base, collect those of her invitees who had managed to arrive, and send out the signal as quickly as possible. Yes, some of the guest list would be too far away or too busy to fit into her timeline, but that was their problem, not hers.

But in the face of their actual presence, Gazelle begins to wonder whether it might be more complicated than that. There will be a power vacuum when they know that Rich is dead; she doesn't delude herself that she'll be able to fill it. Rich had money and genius and men with guns and, moreover, the technological safeguard of the microchips. She will have the money and the men with guns and control over the chips at least for a while, but how long will that control last if some of the others start trying to bypass the chip? Most of them have far more technological knowledge than she does.

_Nothing to be done about it now,_ Gazelle tells herself firmly. _Take care of what you can control, worry about the rest later._

She strides forward and the crowd parts in front of her, each person moving with every appearance of casualness but the effect noticeable nonetheless. She's used to that, at least – because of the legs – and she lets it serve her purpose here, carrying her without interruption across the floor to the staircase and then up onto the observation platform. 

The babble of conversation slowly picks up again when it becomes clear that she isn't going to give some sort of speech. Gazelle slides the bag off her shoulder and uses the bulk of the table as a barrier to conceal it as she pulls out Rich's right hand and carefully works the plastic off. 

It's strange to be touching him like this, she can't deny it. There is little left of _him_ here and yet despite her earlier thoughts about dead weight, his body is not nothing. She doesn't regret leaving most of his body behind, _won't_ regret it. But his hands… perhaps there had been something of him in these hands. They were the hands that had created the SIM cards, after all. 

The thought is enough to make her just the slightest bit reverent as she reaches up and sets the palm of the right hand onto the panel.

It lights up with a flicker, displaying the bright rounded-off squares of the interactive menu and the circular schematic of the satellite paths. A touch of her own hand pulls up the signal activation module and the satellite display winks out, replaced with a pale green outline of two hands, left and right. She moves the palm of the right hand to its corresponding place on the panel and holds it there.

Nothing happens.

A fragment of a memory comes back to her, a discussion over the mechanics of the biometric security system.

"A fingerprint's easy," Rich had said dismissively. "Get it off anything someone's touched, a glass or a doorknob or a countertop. The CIA does it all the fucking time. Full hand is a little more complex but it can be done, if you know what you're doing. That's why I added a few things. Temperature sensor and DNA sample so you can't just use a 3-D printed reconstruction. Skin color recognition – not just black versus white but actual color. It's hard as fuck to match that, let me tell you. When I'm done with this, no one will be able to get into that system but me, myself, and I."

Later when they were actually putting in his data he'd bitched about the pain, but he'd stuck with it. Now _she_ was stuck with it.

_Heat,_ she thinks. _That's what I don't have. But I can get it._ There's a kitchen off one corner of the ballroom a place to make canapes and drinks for the guests. It will have a microwave.

Gazelle re-wraps the arm loosely and puts it back in the bag, slings it over her shoulder. She's just taken a step towards the staircase down from the platform when the alarm goes off.

\-----

The hallway is eerily silent at first – the kind of silence that says dramatic things are happening somewhere else. It's not the sort of thing Merlin can rely on to last, of course, but it's at least temporarily a good sign. 

And it means that, as he rounds a corner, he can clearly hear the faint sounds of someone cursing. 

He moves even more carefully then, pistol at the ready and eyes flickering from the path of strung cables above his head; they disappear into the wall directly above a bland, grey door about four feet away. Merlin pauses to consider his options. There's almost certainly someone in the room, and it almost certainly contains some tech. He could try to draw out whoever it is, but then they'll have the free range of the hallway and any noise they make is more likely to draw attention. No, keeping the action inside the room will be better. 

There is a sound of distant gunfire; it kicks Merlin into action and he moves smoothly forward, twisting the doorknob and swinging into the room only to find himself face to face – and barrel to barrel – with Roxanne Morton.

They stare at each other for a long moment, and then she lowers her gun. "Jesus Christ, Merlin," she says. "I'm going to buy you a fucking cowbell for Christmas."

"What are you doing here?" he says, without lowering his own gun. She's probably not the _last_ person he would have expected to see here, but that's only because pride of place on that list is probably filled by the Dalai Lama and/or the Queen.

"Same as you," she says. "Destroying this."

Her faith that he's on the right side of this conflict is more than a little suspicious. They've spent almost a year together, true, but always in a professional capacity, never a personal one. And she'd learned Kingsman's way of doing things too well to be un-cautious now. "I could be working for Valentine," he probes.

Her eyes rake down over his body and then back up. "Not wearing that jumper, you couldn't."

Merlin feels his face heat up and that, perversely, is what makes him decide she's telling the truth about why she's here. He lowers his gun. "How did you get here, anyway? How did you even _know_ about Valentine?"

"Helicopter," she says. "And… Eggsy. Of course."

"Of course," Merlin says. _Fucking Eggsy,_ he thinks, and then goes around the desk to see what she's doing.

\-----

Harry only manages two minutes before running into a pack of fifteen or so guards – possibly his all time personal worst stealth time. Although he doesn't count that time with the two Ecuadorean princesses, because that had been entirely Bedivere's fault.

"Ah, gentlemen," he says, dropping the hand with the pistol down to his side and sliding his most idiotic smile onto his face. "I'm so sorry, I was looking for the bathroom and I appear to have got a little bit turned around."

It's no good, though – suspicion is already flashing over the first guard's face and Harry drops to the floor, rolling sideways to avoid the first spray of bullets. The power sings sharply into life and the next wave clatters off an invisible barrier. Harry kicks himself up into a crouch and fires twice, taking out the leader and the one immediately to his left; they go down with satisfying finality but the others are well-trained enough that they keep coming.

Harry reaches out with the power, scrabbling at the bricks in the wall with a thought to using them as close-range projectiles. But the wall is too solidly made and he gives up the idea after a moment of mental struggle. It's easier to reach for the guns, twisting them up with a quick thought just as he had done with Gazelle's legs – and it leaves the guards gaping, too stupefied to react for a long moment. 

One of them recovers quickly and lunges for him across the bodies of the others, swinging his rifle up to use as a club. Harry pushes himself to his feet and then carries on pushing, using the power to carry him three quarters of the way up the wall, above the heads of the guards. He hangs there for a moment, one hand braced against the ceiling, and then it's down again on the far side of the group, curling into a roll to control the fall and then up onto his feet.

He casts a quick glance backwards at the guards but they're still stumbling around each other in confusion, some of them trying to turn around and others just looking up. Harry definitely has the upper hand now, but his purpose here isn't to kill as many guards as possible, it's to find Gazelle, and so after a moment of assessment he takes off before he can lose his head start.

\-----

Eggsy manages to get through quite a bit of the base without running into anyone at all. There isn't a lot _here_ , is the thing – sure, there are quarters for security guards and a gym, but he'd been expecting something more like the mansion he'd just come from. A home theatre, a library, a whole host of posh arsehole leisure activities. There is a small set of apartments behind a hidden door, decorated so much like Valentine's bedroom in the mansion that Eggsy supposes it must be the equivalent – but there's nowhere for all the guests to stay, nowhere that even comes close to having room for the hundreds of people he'd seen in the ballroom. Maybe Valentine's plan had been to just kick them out after the signal had done its work, which seems more than a little short-sighted. Eggsy's beginning to realize that Valentine had been a genius at the big picture but hopeless with the details. Sure, kill off 90% of the world's population. Who's going to do the farming after that? Who's going to wash clothes? Who's going to scrub the toilets?

Probably they'd all thought they'd have robots for that shit. Eggsy, having done a fair bit of laundry and toilet-scrubbing in his life, knows it isn't that simple.

The layout of the base isn't straightforward, but Eggsy figures he's just about circled around to the opposite side from the ballroom doors when red lights start flashing from the ceiling. 

_Brilliant,_ he thinks, and breaks into a jog. Another hallway reveals nothing except some storage rooms, but when he comes to the next junction he runs smack into a squadron of five guards coming down from the right-hand side. 

"Ah, 'scuse me," Eggsy says, sliding his pistol surreptitiously back into his pocket. "I was just looking for the—" It's obvious they aren't buying it – one of them is already swinging his rifle up – and so Eggsy gives up in the middle of the sentence and just wades in, fists flying. 

It's almost a relief to have a good, honest brawl. Not that he _can't_ sneak around, when it's called for, but he's good at this: the snap of an elbow to a face, a punch to the gut. The first guard goes down easily and the next two aren't much better. Guns are pretty much a liability when they're this close – nobody wants to shoot their teammate because that's markedly bad for morale – and so Eggsy twists out of the space between them, thumping the butt of one rifle as he goes and then letting their momentum do most of the work. 

Guard #3 is a little bit more savvy and kicks out, trying to sweep Eggsy's legs out from under him, but Eggsy hops over the swing and then ducks into a roll, coming up again with his feet in Guard #5's crotch. The others are beginning to recover, so Eggsy takes a couple of punches to his chest. One is only a glancing blow but the other is enough to make his bones shake. 

He gets his forearm up to block the next punch and then carries it across to slam into the guard's throat, sending him to the ground with a muffled scream. One of the others grabs at Eggsy's jacket, hauling him backwards; he slams his head back and bashes it into the man's nose, which gives way with a crunch. The hand on his jacket lets go abruptly and Eggsy ducks underneath the incoming punch from Guard #4. He catches a sleeve on a rifle barrel and the movement spins him around – and now he can see more guards coming down the hall in the distance, fifteen or more, and he's good but he's not _that_ good, not without a better defensible position than a hallway.

_Gazelle ain't here,_ Eggsy thinks. _This shit is just wasting time._ He goes all out then, slamming one guard against the wall and punching two more in the face in quick succession, then kicking them until they stay down. When he finally has a little breathing room he straightens up, meeting the eyes of the first guard in the pack that's approaching, still yards away.

"Stop!" says the guard, swinging his rifle up into position. Eggsy crouches down and grabs for the closest rifle – it's still slung over someone's shoulder but the man is limp enough that Eggsy can get a decent grip, pulling it upwards and firing off a quick burst. 

The guards fall back, ducking for some sort of nonexistent cover. Eggsy scrambles to his feet. "Fuck you!" he says cheerfully, and then turns and legs it in the opposite direction.


	14. Chapter 14

The sudden flash of the alarm illuminates the ballroom below her, a vast sea of upturned faces now shaded in strobing red. All of these guests are hand-picked and Gazelle had, perhaps, hoped to find some common ground among them – but in this moment they seem as dazed and stupid as any of the rest, prisoners and old money and all.

Moving through them is a group of guards – these, at least, have had the sense to react immediately rather than just mill about. Gazelle takes the stairs down from the platform in three great leaps and meets them at the bottom. "Find whoever it is," she says to the guard in front. "Find them, kill them. Quickly."

"Yes ma'am."

She doesn't stay to watch them go, just turns towards the back of the room and pushes through the crowd. They're a little slower to get out of her way this time – the implications of that certainly aren't good, but she doesn't have the time to examine them in detail.

The door into the kitchen swings open easily. The catering staff scatters with a smattering of screams at her entrance, which is gratifying at least. The two men closest to the microwave have gone frozen in obvious terror and Gazelle has to shove one of them bodily out of the way so that she can reach it. 

"Ma'am," ventures the other one.

"Shut up," she says. "And tell me what's the best setting for defrost."

\-----

"I was looking for Valentine's machine," Roxy says. "Unfortunately I don't think this is it. But it seems to be hooked into the security system of the base – it started doing all sorts of things when the alarm went off a few minutes ago. So we ought to be able to do _something_ with it."

Merlin comes around the desk and she slides out of the way so that he can take over. His eyebrows go up when he sees the body of the security guard that she'd dragged into the corner but he doesn't comment on it, just turns to the monitor and makes a humming noise of consideration as he sets his hands to the touchscreen on the surface of the desk.

Roxy feels a rush of relief. She's good enough with computers but Merlin is on another level entirely – if anyone can make this half-access work, it's him. The alarm going off had at least allowed her to bring up some of the security menus but she hasn't had much luck actually doing anything with them. There's another program that seems to be satellite-related, but she can't get into that one either.

Merlin taps out a quick command and then another – things Roxy has tried already, although she doesn't try to tell him that. He seems to recognize it after a few moments anyway and flashes her a brief, approving look. It makes her want to stand a little straighter. "You did well," he says. "There are a few other things I would have shown you if we'd had more time. I suspect one of them will— ah. There we go." She leans in over his shoulder to watch as he works his way through the available options. "Yes, this is somewhat limited. No access to the signal activation itself. But if I can assist Harry, that will help."

"Galahad's out there?" Roxy says in surprise, and almost immediately feels like an idiot. "Nevermind, of course he is," he says. "That's how you got here, isn't it? The whole apparition thing?"

"Apparition?"

"Teleportation," she clarifies. "I'll get you the Harry Potter books for Christmas along with the cowbell."

"I'll get _you_ some actual literature," he says. "But yes, that's how we got here. I don't know if Gazelle is here yet or not. We're in the range when she could be, but I don't know how long things would have taken in Kentucky."

"I don't know either," Roxy admits. "I didn't see her in the ballroom earlier, but that doesn't mean much."

"There's a ballroom," Merlin says flatly.

"With a million disco balls hanging from the ceiling," Roxy says, just to see him wince.

"Yes, of course. So they can all be genocidal in style." He scrubs a hand over his face. "All right. Let's see if we can't give them something else to think about besides disco. Because they all have that microchip in their neck, I should think. We've seen one of those explode. And if one of them can explode, so can they all."

He types in a few lines of something, slides his thumb across the touchscreen. A box pops up on the monitor, labeled 'Activate chip?' There are two buttons below, one that says 'Confirm' and one that says 'Cancel.'

Merlin lifts his hand to press 'Confirm' and Roxy puts her hand over his without any sort of conscious realization that she's going to do so. 

"Lass—" Merlin says.

Roxy would bristle at that, but she's too busy pinning down the thought that had flickered into life in the back of her mind. The word 'explode' is a very final sort of word. It would be easy enough to let Merlin take care of all Valentine's lackeys with one quick tap of a finger. But… it's a bit too much like shooting first and asking questions later. If she'd done that with Eggsy, they'd probably all be dead by now.

"What if some of them were coerced?" she says. "I don't know how much of this place you've seen, but there are an awful lot of prisoners here. Hostages, maybe."

Merlin opens his mouth, shuts it again and purses his lips. "Perhaps," he allows.

"Not to mention – how many of them are there, out in the world? Hundreds, thousands?" She's not above using whatever technique will work on him. "Consider the _cleanup_."

Merlin barks out a laugh; he looks surprised at himself afterwards, but Roxy can tell she's made her point. 

"All right," he says. He tugs his hand out of hers and presses 'Cancel.' 

"Can you knock them out instead?" Roxy says. "That'll still help, but at least we won't do anything we can't undo."

"Possibly," Merlin says. "Christ, I'd forgotten what it was like to work with someone reasonable." He turns back to the screen. "Give me a minute."

\-----

Eggsy knows he doesn't have much of a head start and so he pushes open the first set of doors he can find, slips inside and takes in the room at a glance. It's an industrial kitchen, with stainless steel tables that gleam under the harsh fluorescent lights, a row of sinks all along the far wall and a row of ovens and stovetops to the right. There are a few people here, obviously catering staff of some sort, but they're all distracted by a flurry of activity in the far corner and so Eggsy turns his back on them to wrestle one of the tables in front of the doors as a makeshift barricade. 

When he turns around again, he sees Gazelle. She's bent over one of the appliances, pulling something out. Eggsy fumbles for the pistol in his pocket but he's not quite fast enough – one of the catering staff screams at the sight of it and they all scatter, obstructing his view. The crowd clears after a moment but Gazelle is moving already, tossing aside whatever she'd been holding and bracing herself on the tabletop so that she can leap across and lunge at him. 

Eggsy fires two quick shots and then abandons the pistol in favor of ducking into a roll under the table. Once he's underneath entirely he kicks upwards and to the left, sending the table skidding sideways in the hope of catching Gazelle mid-leap. When he comes up on the other side he can tell it hasn't worked; she's twisted out of the way instead and Eggsy has to slide hastily back as one of her legs slams down right where his head would have been.

He shoves himself under another table for cover but this time only hovers there for a second – long enough to see the gleam of light ripple across metal as Gazelle jumps again – and then he scrambles back out the way he'd come, slamming his arm up to catch Gazelle across the back of the thighs with his forearm. It's a solid hit, but he has to pull back almost immediately in order to avoid the backwards swing of a blade.

_Fuck me, she's quick._

As Eggsy rolls to the side he catches sight of the table to his left, half-filled with food prep. He grabs at whatever he can reach and flings it at her. Gazelle bats away a handful of radishes with one hand; next is two heads of lettuce, which she shreds into a spray of confetti with an almost contemptuous slash of her leg. Eggsy has better luck with the knives since she actually has to dodge those, skittering out of the way so they that they clatter against the door of the oven behind. He keeps one knife for himself, a substantial-sized cleaver, but there's a metal bowl as well so he flings that, too; it clangs into one of her legs and spins away, making a tremendous ringing sound that carries on even as it disappears under a table. 

They circle around each other in a moment of mutual assessment. Eggsy's cleaver isn't much compared to Gazelle's legs; he wishes he'd managed to steal one of those lighter grenades but there'd no time to get it out of his pocket anyway, much less throw it and get the hell out of the way. So hand-to-hand, or at least blade-to-blade, it is. 

Gazelle seems to come to the same conclusion at about the same time and they come together in a proper close-quarters fight. The cleaver is enough to let Eggsy fend her off a few inches at most and so he tries to make the most of it, scrabbling at her shirt with his left hand and stabbing with the right. He draws blood along the line of her right forearm but loses the tip of his shoe in turn – thank fuck he's never managed to get out of the habit of buying too-large trainers. 

He falls into a strange sort of rhythm – step, stab, dodge, slash, dodge again and turn to stab again. Gazelle is good enough that he never quite gets the upper hand, but not so good that she can take him apart easily. They dance around each other, anticipating and moving and meeting in the middle only to clash and part and begin the anticipation again. Eggsy thinks distantly that if she'd been a Kingsman he'd have liked sparring with her. But it's like everything that Valentine got his greedy hands on – a fucking waste of potential.

At last Eggsy gets a half-second's advantage and goes for the throat. Gazelle has to jump back hastily; her neck is inches away but by then the angle is all wrong and Eggsy swings around rather than over-extend himself. When he comes back again they are separated by only four feet, both breathing hard. 

Eggsy meets her eyes, flicks the tip of the knife up and towards himself a fraction of an inch in the universal gesture of _come and have a go if you think you're hard enough_. Gazelle bares her teeth. But instead of charging at him, her eyes flicker sideways, and then she's off, hurdling over the upturned table to snatch something up off the next one over. On the far side of that table is a set of doors and she slams the right one open, pushing through it and leaving Eggsy completely flat-footed for nearly five seconds before his brain catches up and he runs after her. 

\-----

Harry's plan of 'find Gazelle, terminate with extreme prejudice' hasn't, of course, survived contact with the enemy. The first group of guards had recovered quickly despite their surprise and he'd been hard-pressed to keep ahead of them in the hallways. Then he'd rounded a corner and run slap-bang into another squadron, even bigger than the other.

The position gives him no choice but to wade into close-quarters combat. Fire off a few shots, punch, kick, scrabble for a new magazine and reload and fire again. He tries to repeat his earlier maneuver of twisting gun barrels into an unusable curl of metal, but it's impossible to concentrate when he's fending off attacks from both sides. After thirty seconds he lets go of his control entirely and the power ripples out like a wave. It seems thrilled to be let loose, like a dog off the leash for the first time in months. 

Then they're working in tandem, Harry and this new part of himself. He can turn to his left and fire knowing that there's a shield at his back; he can grab a guard by the shoulder, twist his wrist just so to release the thin wire of the garrote and wrap it around the man's throat, all the while knowing that the other three closest guards will find themselves stumbling into each other by some invisible shove.

It's like the church, perhaps too much for comfort – the fierce happiness of the fight and all the parts of him working in unison, knowing that he's at his best. The satisfaction of the kill, of putting guards down with finality. It's this last that worries him most, perhaps. It's necessary, in his line of work – better this than his soul-weary hesitation in Chester's office – but still.

_Don't think about that,_ Harry tells himself. _Think about this._ The words are a trigger, a trained-in signal to his brain to shut off background thoughts and focus. 

He goes on – five minutes, ten, twenty – holding his own with the power watching his back. But the guards keep coming and he can feel himself beginning to tire. The power is tiring too. A few bullets spatter through the invisible shield before it redoubles its efforts; Harry takes them on his arm and his chest, armored by his Kingsman suit, but any one of them could easily have been a shot to the head.

They've backed him down the hall by now; Harry glances in that direction and sees another hallway branching off, perhaps twenty feet away. He takes a chance and runs for it, skidding around the corner into a slightly wider space lined with doors, ten feet apart. The doors are set back from the wall slightly and so Harry flattens himself against the closest one, taking advantage of the four inches of cover that it provides. 

_I'd give a lot to have a working comm system right about now,_ Harry thinks. _Then I could tell Merlin to shift his arse._ The power hums in unhappy agreement. It readies itself for a new assault as the first phalanx of guards rounds the corner, and then—

And then they wobble to a stop, all at once; Harry can see the closest guard''s eyes roll up into her head before she staggers and falls. The others are doing the same all around and there is a brief cacophony of thudding as a succession of bodies hits the floor. Then, silence.

Harry reaches for the power but it's as confused as he is. This isn't something he's done. He steps out from the protection of the niche cautiously; none of the guards gets back up or even twitches. 

_I take back everything I've ever said about Merlin's sense of timing,_ Harry thinks, and he's just turning to look down the hallway which branches into three when a voice comes at him out of the silence.

"The other one went to the left," it says.


	15. Chapter 15

It doesn't take Merlin long to figure out how to alter the chip settings for unconsciousness rather than explosion. He's used to working under pressure, of course – but to be truthful, it's partly to prove himself to Roxy.

She was right about the head explosions, he has to admit that much. It would have been an expedient solution. But maybe expedience isn't the only thing he needs to consider. Maybe that's the way Chester had taught them to think. Merlin has been dissatisfied with the direction of Kingsman for a while but he hadn't understood why, not until Harry tried to keep him out of this mission, not until being reminded that there were more roles in the world than hero and villain.

And so he bends himself to this task with a will that has, perhaps, been absent lately. Valentine's system stutters and twists and then bends at last to his will. The microchip signal changes frequency. This time, when the 'Confirm?'' box pops up, he presses the button without hesitation.

"Is that it?" Roxy says. She gives him an impressed look; it ought not to roll over him the way it does. It's been a long time since someone looked up to him – even Eggsy, for all his awe at Kingsman, had always had too much of a chip on his shoulder to care for anyone but Harry.

"For the microchip," he reminds her. "Not for the SIM cards. But perhaps… did you say there was something in here about satellites?"

\-----

Harry swings around, gun up, but the only people obviously in sight are unconscious. The voice clears its throat. "Over here."

Harry hadn't taken much account of the doors set into the sides of the hallway, other than to take advantage of their position. But when he looks more closely towards the sound of the voice he can see that each door has a small metal window and a keypad to the right of the door. Most of the windows are closed but there is one open; a woman's face is pressed close to it, peering out and directly at him.

She looks vaguely familiar, and after a moment Harry puts a name to the face. "Princess Tilde?" Her name had been on the list of the missing – someone that Valentine had most likely kidnapped. The rest of these doors must lead to cells, must hold more prisoners.

"Yes, I am. You are better informed – the young woman did not recognize me, I do not think."

"Young woman?" Harry says, blinking.

"She was with your group, I thought. She mentioned a rescue mission."

Harry has absolutely no idea who the young woman could be. Someone from MI6? The CIA? It wouldn't surprise him to learn that other agencies had concerns about Valentine, but he doesn't know how they could be here so quickly. Perhaps they had a mole in Valentine's organization. If so, they'd been doing a piss poor job of things so far.

"She went to the left," Tilde says. "To look for the machine."

If he trusts that this young woman – whoever she is – is actually on his side, then it makes better sense for them to work separately. Moreover, Harry isn't interested in the machine; he's interested in Gazelle and he certainly doesn't have time to dawdle.

"Best not to duplicate effort," he says. "I'm here to take care of Gazelle first and foremost."

"What about Valentine?"

"Dead."

"Good," Tilde says, viciously pleased. "But yes, Gazelle must be handled. She is very dangerous."

It's slightly galling to be given direction by a woman in a prison cell. Then again, she _is_ a princess. When they get out of this, he'll be glad to have earned her goodwill. "I quite agree," Harry says. "Perhaps you'd be so kind as to advise me about the most likely direction to take?"

"To the right," she says. 

Harry nods. He weighs the pistol in his hand, then ejects the clip and loads the last full one from his pocket. "Thank you ever so much," he says, and takes off running.

\-----

Gazelle is quick on her feet and has the advantage of surprise besides, so Eggsy is a good twenty feet behind her when he comes out into the ballroom. The last time he'd been here it had been full of people – and it still is, except that they're lying all over the floor. Not even tidily; it's pretty clear that they'd fallen rather than chosen to lie down. Not a one of them is even looking up at Gazelle or Eggsy. 

The mass of bodies covers almost the entire floor, and despite knowing that everyone here had signed on to Valentines plan, Eggsy has to fight back the instinct to slow down and pick his way between them. Gazelle obviously hasn't bothered being careful and there is blood under his feet, too, spreading slick and hot.

She 's already moving up the stairs to the glass platform; Eggsy hurries after her, but he's only halfway up when she reaches the top and says, "Ah, ah ah," in a sing-song voice, holding up the thing that she'd grabbed from the table in the kitchen. It's—

_Oh fuck me, it's Valentine's arm._

"You're fucking sick," Eggsy informs her, but he does stop climbing. "What the fuck are you going to do with that?"

"What else?" Gazelle says. "Set off the signal for the SIM cards. It's right here, the control system. All I have to do is press this to the panel, and then… Poof! Everyone dies. Your friends, your family. _Everyone_."

_I knew I was right about Valentine's sense of style,_ Eggsy thinks absurdly. _Putting that thing in the middle of the ballroom. Jesus._ "So what d'you want me to do now?" he says. "Just want to rub it in my face?"

"Partly," she admits, and some part of him _burns_ at that. "But also… it doesn't have to be like this. You and I, on opposite sides. You could join me."

"Join you and all the other posh fuckers that sold their souls to the devil?" Eggsy spits.

"They aren't all rich assholes," she says. "Didn't you see that? I brought in plenty of people like you. Artists, chefs, people who can make things. People who can fight. You could be one of them. I'd take your family, too, and your friends. They don't have to die out there."

Eggsy thinks about his mum and Daisy, hidden away in the basement of a machine shop in Peckham, thinks about what they'll see when they come out. He thinks about Ryan and Jamal, probably sitting on a sofa playing Call of Duty and eating fish and chips and drinking cheap beer right about now.

Maybe Gazelle isn't even lying when she says she'll let them live. But Eggsy knows that none of them would want to live in a world where they were saved at the expense of everyone else. None of them would want to live in a world where he gave in.

"Nah," Eggsy says. "I'd rather fucking kill you, thanks." He takes the rest of the stairs in three huge leaps and lunges at her before she can put the hand to the table.

\-----

Harry runs. There's no point in sneaking around any longer and he's beginning to worry about just how long it's taking him to find Gazelle or indeed anything of importance. The base is just hallway, hallway, and more hallway – he'd honestly have wondered what Valentine was even keeping in here if it hadn't been for the endless parade of guards.

_What a waste of a good lair,_ he thinks. _Not even a pit full of sharks to show for himself._

This small humor is almost the only thing keeping him going at this point. He's tired, bone-achingly tired. The power is concentrating in his legs and his feet now, straining, giving him just a little extra push with each step – and he knows he'll pay for the exertion later. But there's no time. Gazelle could be here by now, the signal could already be going out. 

And suddenly he hears something in the distance, something that isn't just his own panting breaths echoing in yet another hallway. He traces it to a side-turning and staggers around the corner only to be faced with two grand double doors. Harry hauls one of them open and finds himself in a ballroom. It's a huge space, two generous stories high, lit all across the ceiling by a wholly unnecessary number of glittering glass shards. Spread out across the floor – just as in the halls – are hundreds of bodies, though almost none of these are wearing the grey camouflage of the soldiers he'd been face with before. 

In the middle of the room is a tall pillar and there – on a platform halfway up, locked in combat with Gazelle – is Eggsy. 

Eggsy, who is supposed to be in the British countryside, hiding his family in some uninhabited barn. Or failing that, is supposed to be in Peckham, doing whatever it is he'd been trying to do when the laptop signal had picked him up. Regardless, he's supposed to be _not here_. Harry hasn't the faintest idea how he'd even done it. It ought to have been impossible – but there Eggsy is, his beautiful impossible boy, up there above the ballroom like some operatic avenging angel. 

Harry's so surprised that he finds himself saying Eggsy's name and it comes out too-loud in the hollow of the ballroom, carrying all the way across the crumpled bodies. Eggsy twitches at the sound of it, starts to turn towards the noise and then drags himself back. It's a bare half-second's distraction, but that's enough. Gazelle gets a knee up on the surface of the table and pushes herself across it; Harry can see that Eggsy won't be able to get out of the way, not in time.

Harry puts his hands out in front of him, draws power from some last reserve deep inside of himself, and _shoves_.

Gazelle goes flying sideways across the platform, her head snapping towards him in shock before she slams into the glass on the far side. It shatters in a sharp tidal wave, radiating outwards from her body until it reaches the edge of the panel and then sprays down onto the floor below. Gazelle grabs at the frame of the window with one hand, a brief moment of arrested momentum, but Harry shoves again and she can't hold against it. He can see the hatred in her eyes, the blood on her hand as it's torn away from the ragged edge of the window – and then she disappears from sight, falling with a crash to the floor below. 

After that, there is silence. 

Harry turns his head to look at Eggsy, who has pushed himself against one of the side windows and is staring right back at him, wide-eyed and lips parted. _There,_ Harry thinks, _take me there, it's close enough, I can see it well enough,_ and the power whines but obliges, snapping him from the floor to the platform. It feels faster than the jump from Kentucky to England, faster even than the one from England to Austria – but Harry can't dwell on the mechanics, not when Eggsy is right there in front of him.

"Eggsy," he says.

"Harry, oh my god," says Eggsy, and then they're clutching at each other. Eggsy puts his arms around Harry's waist, pulls him close. Harry cups Eggsy's face in his hands and kisses him.

He'd left Eggsy with a kiss like this, a selfish one, something he'd had no chance to accept or refuse, and by any rights he should be punching Harry in the face right about now. But instead Eggsy's mouth opens under his almost immediately, a gasp of desperate relief. As if perhaps he actually wants this. As if he might go on wanting it even when they haven't just saved the world.

Harry might be happier about that than he is about _having_ saved the world, if he's honest.

There is a fizzing noise from the table beside them. Harry jerks away in an instinctive reaction, pushing Eggsy behind him even as he's turning to assess the situation. 

The table appears to be some sort of electronic interface – or it _was_ , but now it's nothing more than a large oval covered in dark glass. A thin trail of smoke rises from the far corner where the glass is just barely cracked.

"It's all right," he says, breathing out a sigh of relief – and that's when he realizes that he's done it again, just shoved Eggsy back as if the boy needed cosseting. As if he doesn't even have the skills or the knowledge to take care of himself, when that patently isn't true. 

"I'm sorry," Harry says, turning back, only to realize that Eggsy's just said it too. "Eggsy—"

The expression on Eggsy's face is equal parts stubbornness and fondness. "Shut up a minute," he says. Harry shuts his mouth with a click. "I'm sorry that I disappointed you. I'm sorry that I behaved like a right prick about it and said all that shit I didn't even mean. And I'm sorry that I didn't…" He hesitates. "I'm sorry I didn't trust you. About the last test. I should've known you wouldn't make me hurt JB. I've had a lot of people be shitty to me in my life but I know you were doing your best for me, and I should've trusted you."

Something unravels in Harry's chest, a painful knot he hadn't even known was there. He wonders if there will ever be an end to these revelations. Perhaps now that they've taken care of Valentine and Gazelle, he can have at least a few days to regroup. Probably not. 

But at least he has this, here, now, and that's not just enough, it's more than enough. It's everything.

"Yes, well," Harry says. "I'm sorry that I'm a complete baboon's arse. I'm sorry that I'm set in my ways and ill-tempered and arrogant, and I'm sorry that sometimes I forget that I can't just make you into my own image. Especially because who you really are is so much better than that."

"Harry—" The look in Eggsy's eyes is so bright that it's almost painful to look at. "Harry, you unbelievable shit, you outdid my fucking apology."

Harry stares at him, and then happiness overtakes him and he laughs, kisses Eggsy again still laughing. The power kisses Eggsy too – it's worn down almost to a wisp but there's enough left to wrap around Eggsy's back, pull him close and caress itself over his skin. Eggsy blinks in startlement at the touch but then he curls into it like a cat, letting it gather him in. "Harry," he murmurs, the word half-hidden against Harry's lips.

"Mmm?" It's a bit difficult to think, given how many parts of him are touching Eggsy. Including a part that, forty-eight hours ago, he hadn't even _had_. Still, he braces himself for a difficult question – Christ knows there are plenty enough of those to be asked.

"When we get home, I wanna see what else you can do with all your Hogwarts shit. You know. Making all my clothes disappear, instant lube. The works."

"Eggsy…"

"What?" Eggsy says, all bright innocence, and Harry tilts his head back and laughs and laughs for a long moment before leaning down to kiss him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Immense thanks to ShhNoOneKnows for the beta work as always, and special thanks to solarrift for making such amazing art. Give the art a <3 or reblog over here: [title page](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651922377/title-page-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with), [page 1](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651892077/pg-1-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with), [page 2-3](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651849537/pg-2-3-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with), [page 4-5](https://solarrift.tumblr.com/post/162651808482/pg-4-5-for-the-kingsman-big-bang-with).


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